Tristan Schweiger

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the 200 years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

“Freedom” under capital, Marx wrote, contains a fundamental contradiction. The worker is free to sell their labor because they have escaped medieval serfdom – but they are also “free” of land, property, tools, or machinery to create their own wealth: “And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Since at least the eighteenth century, British and American literature has explored, and is often structured by, this conflict. On the one hand, the novel tells the story of the sovereign individual, guiding their own fortunes and producing order out of a fantasy “state of nature.” On the other hand, radical and proletarian writers have deployed the novel – and later, the screen – as a genre of class struggle, critiquing the violence of capital and how that violence intersects with the violences of racism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This course will read widely in literary and filmic representations of work and workers from the co-emergence of the novel and modern capital in the early eighteenth century through the present. Primary readings/viewings include Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Attaway, Tomás Rivera, Jamaica Kincaid, Colin Higgins, Mike Judge, and Barbara Kopple. Secondary readings will include literary criticism, Marxist and feminist theory, and histories of race, organizing, and solidarity. Open to graduate students and third- and fourth-year undergrads.