ENGL 567 A1: The Cultural Politics of Jane Austen

K. Binhammer

Why Jane Austen? Austen, like Shakespeare, continues to be singled out for solo study and to attract readers across the globe, marking a rare cross-over between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction. This course constellates Austen’s novels with post-1990 adaptations, modernizations and re-mediations of her work in order to read the cultural politics of narrative forms. What can we learn from the historical juxtaposition of Austen’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century representation of gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, and empire with re-circulations of her plots in films from the turn-of-the-twenty-first century? Through close reading and narrative analysis of Austen’s style, we will ask questions about the currency of her novels, both in terms of why her plots of marriage and manners remain current and in terms of the economics of cultural production. This is not a course on ‘Janeites’ or ‘Austenmania’ but it will invite students to think about what the contemporary phenomenon of Austen sequels and spoofs, films, TV series, vblogs, fanfic, websites, book clubs, travel tours, memorabilia and meet-ups might help us understand about her novels and about contemporary culture.

Required Texts (Note: students should purchase the specific editions listed; we will read them in the order they were published; I suggest you try to get ahead with your reading before the start of the Spring term.)

Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics)
Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
Emma (Oxford World Classic)
Persuasion (Oxford World Classic)

Films. Patricia Rozema, Mansfield Park (1999); Sharon Maguire, Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001); Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice (2004); Amy Heckerling, Clueless (1995)
Critical essays accessible through eclass.