Monday 5:55 – 8:35 p.m.
Professor Jaclyn Geller
Jane Austen is becoming increasingly institutionalized. The burgeoning Austen industry includes films and television adaptations of her novels; Austen-themed balls; Austen guides to dating, and, of course, coffee mugs and t-shirts bearing her sentences. But as her popularity increases, critical consensus on what her novels mean becomes ever more difficult to achieve. This class does not aim to arrive at a single understanding of Austen but rather, though close reading, lecture and discussion, reveal how complex and elusive her texts are. Particular attention is paid to Austen's relationship to genres other than the novel, to the non-marital (born out of wedlock or never-married) characters in her fiction, and to her satirical techniques. The class includes a small selection of juvenelia and four novels.