A new political science text shows that Jane Austen has a shrewd understanding of game theory.
No two students respond to Jane Austen the same.
Serving my students a Jane Austen high tea made the novels come alive.
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.
In tomorrow’s World Cup finals, Japan is Cinderella going up against America’s Jane Eyre.
Posted in Bronte (Charlotte) | Also tagged Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Any Given Sunday, Charles Baudelaire, Charlotte Bronte, Cinderella, Dead Poets Society, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Jean de la Fontaine, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach, Soccer, Sports, Taming of the Shrew, Villette, William Shakespeare |
“My idea of good company,” says Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, “is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation.” To which her cousin replies, “That is not good company, that is the best.” I feel that I have emerged from the best of company as my Jane Austen [...]
Sports Saturday I realize that social dancing isn’t normally regarded as a competitive sport, but I have a dance story I want to share so I’ll bend the rules of “Sports Saturday.” This one involves an afternoon of dancing where my Jane Austen seminar learned a number of the steps that her heroines engage in. [...]
Film Friday A while back I wrote about how Patricia Rozema’s film of Mansfield Park sells Jane Austen short. Today I accuse Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) of doing the same. When the film came out, I remember hearing an interview with Lee (maybe on National Public Radio) about how his affinity with Jane [...]
Seldom have I enjoyed a course more than my current first year seminar on Jane Austen—specifically “Jane Austen and the Challenges of Being a Regency Teenager.” The title of the course isn’t historically accurate since young men and women in the early 19th century didn’t think of themselves as teenagers. Adolescence wasn’t as prolonged as [...]
Film Friday Teaching Sense and Sensibility in my Jane Austen First Year Seminar is giving me the chance to once again relish the magnificent way that the author dispenses poetic justice. This time through, I found that the ending of the novel reminds me of the ending of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Since [...]
John Kenneth Galbraith, noted economist and author of The Affluent Society, used to read Jane Austen before he sat down to write. He wanted to achieve the author’s light ironic touch in his own work. Yesterday another liberal economist had me thinking of Austen. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who writes for the New York [...]
Amanda Root as Anne Elliott Film Friday One must show a great deal of sensitivity in how one films a Jane Austen heroine accepting a marriage proposal. That’s because the author never shows us the acceptances directly. Although I am generally not a great fan of filmed versions of Jane Austen novels, I have to [...]
Brandon/Rickman, Marianne/Winslett First of all, a happy birthday to Jane Austen (thanks to my mother for pointing this out). Jane would have been 234 today. My students have been bothered by the Marianne-Brandon marriage that concludes Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Kat Vander Wende reasonably pointed [...]
Sophia Western, by John Hopper I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today. I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the [...]
Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson as Edward, Elinor I’ve been reading essays on Sense and Sensibility and thinking of all the useful lessons it teaches, including about the influence of money on people’s dating decisions. One of my students focused on the figure of Lucy Steele, whom she compared to a woman in the reality [...]
I’m teaching Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility at the moment and, once again, recalling what a masterpiece it is. The interactions between the sisters never fail to elicit sibling stories from my students. Some of us see ourselves as the elder sister Elinor, others as the younger sister Marianne. As the oldest in my family, [...]
In recent posts I have been writing about how young people in the 18th century found moral guidance in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, even though the novel was attacked for corrupting them. Over the next four posts I will tell an inspirational story about one of my students who found guidance in the novels of [...]
