Jane Austen

Brought to you by Hopkins at Home

Join Evelyne Ender in this exploration of questions and reflections of Jane Austen's works. This mini-course is shaped as a set of interrelated lectures. Their aim is to explore questions that will be unraveled along a common thread.  

From the instructor: "My presentations will, each in their own way, respond to the following challenge: if, as the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote, the Enlightenment saw 'an explosion of speech aimed at persuading others,' how can novels persuade us at a time of crisis to rethink – without sentimentality but with the help of reason and imagination – our relation to ourselves and to others?"

The bold move, here, is to imagine that characters can become proxies for this kind of investigation, trusting all the while that fiction can enlighten us, even on that small map drawn by a woman author who could not travel. For lectures 2, 3, and 4 recommended short readings from Austen’s novel can be found here: http://file.dev.jhu.edu/ALUM/HopkinsatHome/JAustenTimesBib.pdf. *If you have challenges opening this link, please copy and paste the URL into your browser.