Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is enduringly popular, constantly adapted, critically celebrated, and occasionally detested. It is also a keystone in the history of the novel. Frequently criticized—and not without a whiff of misogyny—as narrow, provincial, trivial, or privileged, Austen’s novel is in fact a landmark attempt to grapple with, and solve, the fundamental problems that underlie novelistic fiction and representation—from the difficulty of self-reflection and of knowing other minds, to the problem of representing the modern self; from the emergence of character to the co-existence of critique and sentimental attachment to social practices and prejudices, including class, status, and gender. How does Pride and Prejudice reflect and respond to the wider world in which Austen lived—its norms, politics, economics, gender dynamics, class hierarchies, and aesthetic values? How does the marriage plot encode a dialectic of freedom and responsibility? And what can Austen’s masterpiece teach us about living and writing meaningfully in times of profound inequality and absurdity?
In this course, we will consider the aesthetic, formal, and political significance of Pride and Prejudice in the context of the so-called “rise of the novel” (in critic Ian Watt’s famous words). We will read Austen’s novel on its own terms as well as consider its—and, more generally, the novel form’s—place in the socio-cultural evolution of modern life. Our emphasis will be on the ways fundamental Austenian devices and concerns reveal and attempt to resolve some major socio-economic conflicts and contradictions emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to Pride and Prejudice, we will consider an archive of supplementary texts, including some combination of works by Watt, Nancy Armstrong, Frances Ferguson, Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, Anna Kornbluh, Georg Lukács, Sandra Macpherson, Michael McKeon, Juliet McMaster, D. A. Miller, Hina Nazar, Edward Said, and Alex Woloch.
