A new political science text shows that Jane Austen has a shrewd understanding of game theory.
Conservative defenses of Bush’s record on counter-terrorism–”setting aside 9-11…” –call for Jane Austen’s exquisite irony.
Also posted in Wilmot (John) |
In my student’s eyes, there’s no contradiction between Austen the satirist and Austen the romance writer.
Austen’s Emma demonstrates an ethics of care–but only for people in her own class.
Answering machine messages as Austen characters would have composed them
In this millennial’s reading of Jane Austen, she is somewhere between feminine and feministy.
No two students respond to Jane Austen the same.
Mr. Knightley chastises Emma because she undermines their class superiority. The GOP establishment is worried about something similar.
The Common Core State Standards deemphasize literature. In fact, we need more literature taught.
To excite students, teach good writing–not writing that torments.
Find out what Jane Austen character you are with my class’s Jane Austen Personality Profile test.
College students continue to find Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” compelling.
It proved easy to apply the election to Toni Morrison and Jane Austen in my classes.
Serving my students a Jane Austen high tea made the novels come alive.
Like Henry Crawford in “Mansfield Park,” Mitt Romney is inconstant and will say anything.
Playing the card game in “Mansfield Park” gives students insight into the meaning of games.
The 2007 Masterpiece Theater version of “Northanger Abbey” plugs into themes uncovered by 20th century feminists.
Depending on your point of view, literature reduced to tweets is either comic or horrifying.
Also posted in Flaubert (Gustave), Forster (E.M.), Kafka (Franz), Milton (John), Proust (Marcel), Salinger (J. D.), Steinbeck (John) | Tagged Catcher in the Rye, E. M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Howards End, In Search of Lost Time, J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, John Milton, John Steinbeck, Madame Bovary, Marcel Proust, Metamorphosis, Of Mice and Men, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Trial |
In my Theories of the Reader course, we have been taking note of different analogies that theorists apply to reading literature. French phenomenologist George Poulet (“Criticism and the Experience of interiority”) describes reading as a forceful intrusion by the book: As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a [...]
Also posted in Sterne (Lawrence) |
The possibility that poetry can have a deleterious effect on one (the poetry of Scott and Byron anyway) is a possibility that Austen brings up in “Persuasion.”
A student distraught when her fiance dropped her used Jane Austen’s ironic wit in “Sense and Sensibility” to regain perspective and reenter the world.
Literature is better than any self help book for relationship guidance.
If Mitt Romney sells his soul for the nomination, can he get it back? Christopher Marlowe would say that it doesn’t look good.
To update Jane Austen, my class took eight of her characters from “Sense and Sensibility” and put them in Facebook conversation with each other.
Readers often reread Jane Austen to reassure themselves that order can be found in a chaotic world.
A secret marriage entered into by my son Toby could have been taken straight out of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
The minds translates the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives, often to the detriment of what really happened. Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park” muses on this phenomenon.
On Sunday my Jane Austen First Year Seminar students came to my housefor a meal that we took out of the “Jane Austen Cookbook.” The meal took two days to prepare and four people to serve.
The example of Edmund Bertram in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” helps us understand the less-than-ideal choices our leaders sometimes make as they negotiate a compromised world.
In “Mansfield Park” Jane Austen calls out the irresponsible wealthy in ways that the Occupy Wall Street protests would approve.
African American blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates uses Jane Austen’s villainous Fanny Dashwood to penetrate the mindset of American racists.