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Academic Year 2002/2003


Jane Austen: Country Life and Commercial Culture
COL 314 SP

Crosslistings:
WMST 316

Jane Austen has long been admired as a preeminent stylist and a discerning cultural commentator whose novels articulate the transition from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism and from a rural-agrarian to a mercantile-imperialist social economy. Recently, Austen's novels have also become object of consumption by a commercial economy whose participants (ourselves) seek to gratify nostalgia for a Laura Ashley version of "the leisured life." As this course will demonstrate, Austen's own life was very far from being leisured; it was instead a history of dignified struggle to affirm herself as an independent gentry woman and a professional writer. The obstacles she faced--economic, social-structural, ideological--rarely led her into self-pity or sentimentalism. If she was sharp in her criticism of patriarchal men, she was equally pointed in her treatment of self-indulgent women. Her novels set a standard that Hollywood has mass-mediated but may also, after all, understand.

MAJOR READINGS

Jane Austen, the major novels: NORTHANGER ABBEY, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, MANSFIELD PARK, EMMA, PERSUASION
Jane Austen, early sketches and stories: "Love and Friendship," "Catherine," "First Impressions," and others
Jane Austen, novellas and unfinished novels: LADY SUSAN, THE WATSONS, SANDITON
Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Hall, John Halperin, Mary Poovey, Tony Tanner, Virginia Woolf, and others: historical, cultural, critical essays
Films in video

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Thoughtful preparation dedicated participation in class discussion, three interpretive essays and one class presentation.

Unless preregistered students attend the first class meeting or communicate directly with the instructor prior to the first class, they will be dropped from the class list. NOTE: Students must still submit a completed Drop/Add form to the Registrar's Office.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA COL    Grading Mode: Student Option   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-18-2003


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