Caughie, Pamela L. 1953–

PERSONAL: Born 1953. Education: University of Virginia, Ph.D., 1987.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Loyola University Chicago, 6525 Sheridan Rd., Crown Center 203, Chicago, IL 60626. E-mail—pcaughi@luc.edu.

CAREER: Writer, scholar, and educator. Loyola University Chicago, Department of English, Chicago, IL, professor and graduate program director.

WRITINGS:

Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1991.

Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1999.

(Editor) Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Pamela L. Caughie is a writer, educator, and scholar of the works and life of author Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a critical study edited by Caughie, contains essays examining Woolf's work "in terms of modernist-era technologies and their political implications," commented reviewer Karen L. Schiff in Clio. The contributors look at Woolf's writing during a time when steadily proliferating and improving mechanical reproduction technology started to allow different approaches to the creative process. The writers also look closely at Woolf's approach to various new types of technology, including film and sound recording devices, cameras, automobiles, and more. Caughie's introduction "establishes a neutral and inquisitive model for considering how technology influences cultural productions," Schiff noted. New technologies bring about new ways to create art. Caughie's "wide-ranging vision sets the stage for the best sections of the collection, in which articles investigate manifestations of specific technologies in Woolf's work and connect their observations to sociopolitical and/or theoretical contexts," Schiff stated. Among the contributors are Bonnie Kime Scott, who provides an early history of the gramophone and the subversive effects of the recording device on Woolf's novel Between the Acts; Jean Garrity, who makes a connection between Woolf's iconic literary status and the writer's earlier appearance in British Vogue; Holly Henry, who explicates connections between the telescope and the form of Woolf's narrative perspectives and political opinions; Mark Hussey, who applies Woolf's ideas on the reading of books to the modern effects of computer technology and information processing on modern readers; and Maggie Humm, who sees Woolf's own albums of photographs as being shaped by the effects of women's access to modes of public dissemination during Woolf's lifetime. There are also comparisons made between Woolf and noted writer Walter Benjamin in terms of the two writers' common interests in technology.

As an editor, Caughie has "wrought a fascinating collection of essays by bringing together a superb cast of Woolf scholars," noted reviewer Liedeke Plate in symploke. "An invitation to reassess the relation between modernist works and their material conditions of production to politics and mass culture, the volume also invites thinking about our own age of mechanical reproduction," Plate remarked. "This anthology's technological focus is relevant to today's society as well as interesting in its own right," Schiff concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Clio, winter, 2002, Karen L. Schiff, review of Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 209.

symploke, winter-spring, 2001, Liedeke Plate, review of Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 209.

ONLINE

Loyola University Chicago Department of English Web site, http://www.luc.edu/depts/english/ (March 11, 2006), information about author.