Professor Autumn Womack

So I, you know, I go back to those texts and it doesn't always make it in the book, but kind of think like, okay, what is it about this text, right?

What as a reader, right?

Because she always says, I'm writing like a reader, I'm reading like a writer.

So how is she reading these texts?

So that's been really, that's been really fun.

You know, it's such an interesting question.

And I have to say, I am such an Americanist that I was like, I had even more of a superficial relationship to Virginia Woolf.

You know, when she's writing her master's thesis, which I know you all talked about in the last podcast, she's a master's student.

It's very thematic.

It's about alienation.

And I think that's really important to her.

But I see resonances with her and Woolf

Actually, in questions of form and their relationship to the novel, and they're both so committed to finding and locating this form that can address their particular writerly outlook.

on and of the world.

And particularly, I mean, for Wolf, it's such like this post-war moment and how that has dissembled reality.

And for Morrison, it's this long history of racism and slavery.

And so they're deep, both of their shared commitment to form.

And they both do have a similar kind of way of moving out from a moment into these deep times.

And it happens really a lot in Beloved, right?

Where there will be an encounter