ENGLISH 145A: Jane Austen's Fiction and Fans

Course Description:

When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen began to write, the novel was still liable to be dismissed by serious readers and writers on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Austen’s achievement helped to transform the genre, helping establish fiction as the form that (paradoxically enough) explains reality and as the form that explains us to ourselves. In this class we'll all six of Austen’s novels and study the contribution they made to the remaking of modern fiction. Though our emphasis will fall on these works’ place in the literary culture of Austen’s day and on their historical contexts in an era of political, social, and literary revolution, we’ll also acknowledge the strong and ardent feelings that Austen’s oeuvre continues to arouse today. To that end, we’ll do some investigating of the frequently wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it.  At the same time, we’ll also remember that Austen knew fandom from both sides; part of our work this semester will be to learn about the early-nineteenth-century culture of literary appreciation in which Austen both enrolled the heroines of her fiction and enrolled herself.

Course Objectives:

To enrich our understanding of Jane Austen’s fictions by attending both to their social and political contexts (and her culture’s debates about slavery, empire, Englishness, marriage and property law, women’s education, and women’s rights) and, just as importantly, their literary contexts. This will mean investigating the standing of the novel at the close of the eighteenth century in Britain: Austen, it has been said, wrote her novels to improve the form—exactly why might she have thought it required this improving?

 To examine the formal/artistic innovations of Austen’s fiction (her innovative use of “free indirect discourse”; her strategies for narrative authority; her relation to satire, etc.) and think about how they helped prepare the ground for the novel’s ascendancy in the literary hierarchy and its emergence by the mid-19th century as the modern literary form. You should, in other words, exit this course having refined your sense of how all fiction works. You’ll learn skills that you can use in other coursework and which will enrich your life as a reader.

 To understand how and why the novel in general, and Austen’s fiction in particular, produces such ardent responses in its audiences. What is the attraction of fiction and why have people so often been frightened by its pull?

 To introduce Janeites and Janeiteism, to speculate as a class about the relationship between studying books and loving them, to analyze the nature of fandom, and to consider whether fandom might sometimes be valued as its own kind of knowledge practice. So another question we’ll be grappling with might go as follows: Are WE Janeites?

Course format:

This course involves two lectures of 75 minutes each per week, plus an additional discussion section  with your TF, once a week.  Sections will begin in week 2 of the semester. I tend to build lots of opportunities for conversation into my lectures.

Who Should Take This Course:

"Jane Austen's Fictions and Fans" is an open enrollment course intended for all members of the Harvard community.  You don't have to be a concentrator in English to do well in this course. You don’t even have to be a FAN of Austen's to enroll and do well in this course--there’s a long and robust tradition of Austen-hating as well as Austen-loving, as we will be discussing.  But you do have to be open to thinking about why her novels arouse these strangely strong feelings. You do have to be open to having some fun as well thinking about some of the wittiest writing in the literary tradition.  I really hope you’ll join in on our conversations and our fun.  

Please note that I teach this course only every 2-3 years: if you're considering taking it during your time at Harvard, please don't postpone. 

Assignments and grading:

Participation : 15 %

Paper no. 1 (involving Austen’s fiction of the 1790s), 5-7 pp. (1,500-2,000 words)

Worth 20%

Paper no. 2 (involving the “Chawton novels”), 5-7 pp. (1,500-2,000 words)

Worth 25%

 Short research assignment no. 1 (a 3-4-page paper whose topic you’ll develop with me, centered on a particular manifestation of the amateur love of literature --a text/manuscript/object from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries that is now held in the Houghton Library. I’d like each of you to “adopt” one of these texts/manuscripts/objects and write an introduction to it.  In this introduction you should, first, describe the object, beginning with an overview (the detailed record in Hollis will be useful for this purpose) and then selecting some details to discuss, and, second, you should draw on some of the assigned and reserved readings for our class to assess it in relationship to the histories of literary (or theatrical) celebrity, authorship, reading, and/or fandom. (Further details to come.)

Worth 20%

Short research assignment no. 2 (A 3-4 page paper on an artefact that introduces a particular specimen of contemporary Austen-themed fan culture: find either in the real world or the digital one a particularly intriguing/outrageous blog, YouTube video, piece of fan fiction, Jane Austen-themed game, travelogue account of an Austenian pilgrimage, or Austenian celebration of some other sort, and drawing on what you’ve learned this semester about both Austen’s fiction and the cultures of fandom, make an argument about which elements in her work it responds to and what sort of place it occupies in the history of those works’ reception. Another option: create some sort of Austenian homage yourself and submit it with some writing (about 1 full page) that explains it and identifies its context in the larger world of Austen fandom/the history of literary admiration.  (Further details to come.)

Worth 20 % 

Past syllabus:

Here is the syllabus from the last time I taught English 145a.  English 145afinalsyllabus Fall2021.pdf

By dropping the TV series "Lost in Austen" from the end of the semester, I'm hoping to make the space to squeeze in Austen's Northanger Abbey , which in 2021 I taught only in an optional session, outside class hours, in the evening (with pizza). In Fall 2024 Northanger will be given a week of class time (one lecture per volume).  I still want us to have a pizza night together one way or another--perhaps we will watch an adaptation together?  

Course Policies:

How will your TF and I determine your participation grade for English 145a? (Participation counts toward 15% of your final grade.) We will think about your contributions over the course of the semester to our conversations, whether those have been made during our lecture meetings, during section meetings, or posted to our class’s Slack channel. We’ll think about the questions that you’ve asked about the course content, whether in class or during student support hour chats or by e-mail. Your participation grade will also register whether you’ve come prepared to class (having completed the reading for the day) and whether you’ve remained focused during our meetings. (This will be a semester of many distractions, we fear, so we’re inclined to cut you some slack where focus is concerned. But please do your best for all our sakes.) 

Due dates: I am happy to grant extensions, but will do so only if you consult with both me and your TF at least forty-eight hours before the due date. If you submit a paper late without asking our permission, you should expect to be penalized (for example, a day after the deadline, a paper that would ordinarily earn a B+ will automatically garner a B instead, after 3 days, it will become a B- paper, after 5 days a C+ paper, and so on and so forth).