English 177-1 - Winter, 2014

Study of an Individual Author

Topic: Jane Austen

Class Information

Instructor: Roy, Parama
CRN: 62657
Time: MWF 12:10-1:00
Location: 90 SS/Hum.

Description

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
(Charlotte Bronte to G.H. Lewes, 1848)

Two centuries after her death, Jane Austen may be, as she has long been, the most popular novelist in the English language. Yet admiration for her writing has not been universally shared, as Bronte’s disparagement makes clear; so does the recent brouhaha about the decision to put her face upon the ten-pound note in Britain. Part of our task in this course will be to examine the topic of Austen’s reputation–the Austen-love that makes Janeites of so many, as well as the detestation that her very name has aroused in others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We will study five (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) of her six major novels, plus Lady Susan, a short unpublished epistolary novel. We will read Austen’s novels in the context of the development of her narrative method, especially the use of free indirect discourse and the reworking of a novelistic tradition that featured large numbers of women writers and readers. We will seek to situate her writing in the context of the principal political and social circumstances of her day as well as the more quotidian ones: the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars; the discourse of women’s rights; the condition of propertyless women, surplus daughters, governesses, illegitimate children, and younger sons; masculine and feminine education, work, and idleness; social mobility, debt, inheritance, and marriage; consumer culture and capitalist ideology; and the slave trade and colonialism. We will read Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “The Janeites,” plus short excerpts from the work of Austen’s early reviewers and her notable contemporaries, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, and Walter Scott. We will also read critical essays by Claudia Johnson, D.A. Miller, Mary Poovey, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, and Mary Favret.

Austen’s novels may be lean by nineteenth-century standards but they are not short; four of them are in the neighborhood of 300 pages. Please begin reading them before the winter quarter begins. There is no more enjoyable way to spend your break.

Grading

Take-home midterm; 8-9 page paper; final; unannounced quizzes; posts to a class forum on Smartsite; and attendance and participation.

Texts

NORTHANGER ABBEY, LADY SUSAN.., 3rd edition, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford University Press) , Jane Austen
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edition), Jane Austen
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, ed. Donald Gray (Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition), Jane Austen
MANSFIELD PARK, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Norton Critical Edition), Jane Austen
Emma, ed. George Justice (Norton Critical Edition), Jane Austen
Persuasion, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (Norton Critical Edition), Jane Austen