Syllabus for OLLI at American University, Spring 2014

Study Group: Jane Austen, the First Half or Steventon, Bath and Southampton

Spring 2014

• Day: Thursday afternoons, 1 to 2:50 am, Temple Baptist Church
• Dates: Classes start Mar 3rd; last day May 9th: this class Mar 6th through May 2nd, 2014
• Study Group Leader: Dr Ellen Moody
• Ellen's website
• Time in Austen: chronology of her life, timelines in her novels.
• An Austen miscellany: contains variety of materials, and much on the Austen films
• Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two: a blog on Austen, women's art, the 18th century
• Texts: any editions will do but these are recommended. Students are asked to bring a copy of the novel or novels we are discussing for the week to class.
  • Jane Austen. Love and Freindship and Other Early Works, ed. Introd. Sarah Frantz (Barnes and Noble)
  • --------------. Sense and Sensibility, introd. Margaret Drabble (Signet)
  • --------------. Pride and Prejudice, introd. Margaret Drabble (Signet)
  • --------------. The Watsons (in Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon), introd., ed. Margaret Drabble (Penguin)
  • Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers Vows: (online, a selection TBA)
  • Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on Slavery and the Commerce of the Human Species (online, a selection TBA)
  • Jane Austen. Mansfield Park, introd. Margaret Drabble (Signet)

Description of Course

This study group will read will Austen's first three published novels in the order they were published. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park. We will contextualize them through her artistic development and life, and what today's popular films make visible about the way film-makers think readers understand them. We will read Love and Freindship written when she was teenager at Steventon as prologue and discuss letter novels as part of our reading of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice The class will watch select excerpts from the Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice films from the Austen film canon. We will move to her time in Bath and The Watsons, a fragment written during the Bath years, as prologue to Mansfield Park, the first full version written while she was in Southampton. During the three weeks of reading this third novel we'll read an excerpt from Inchbald's Lovers Vows (which the characters in the book act out) and from Clarkson's Essay on Slavery (Mansfield Park depends on profits made in Antigua). The class concludes by watching an excerpt from Whit Stillman's indie Metropolitan (1990).

Format: Study group meetings will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

Schedule

• March 6: Austen's early life at Steventon; Love and Freindship; begin Sense and Sensibility
• March 13: Sense and Sensibility
• March 20: Class canceled
• March 27: Sense and Sensibility (with excerpts from 1995 Sense and Sensibility, 2011 From Prada to Nada and 2008 Sense and Sensibility)
• April 3: Letter novels and Pride and Prejudice
• April 10: Pride and Prejudice
• April 17: Pride and Prejudice (with excerpts from 2008 Lost in Austen, and the 1979, 1995 or 2005 Pride and Prejudice); The Watsons; Jane Austen in Bath; begin Mansfield Park
• April 24: Continue Mansfield Park with excerpts from Lovers Vows
• May 1: Clarkson on Essay on Slavery, political backgrounds: continue Mansfield Park
• May 8: Finish Mansfield Park (with excerpt from 1990 Metropolitan) concluding thoughts on Jane Austen's 1st three published novels, her juvenilia and unfinished novels