Sense & Sensibility | Chapter 1-6 Lecture | Austen, Free Indirect Discourse, the Dashwood Sisters

Well, it's really great to see you all again here at the beginning of our 8-week study on Jane Austin's sense and sensibility. This meeting tonight will last for 90 minutes. Half of it, the first 45 minutes um is going to be my lecture and then after the lecture, we'll have 45 minutes of guided discussion with those questions that I pre-irculated on on uh Friday last week. Now, as we go on, I won't always do a 45minute lecture.

I think it's good for me to do one right at the beginning and then I'll I'll vary it a bit where we might have more of like a a presentation guided discussion. We have three discussions and I give a kind of introduction to the questions. Um, but that's what we're going to be doing tonight, right? Okay.

So, we are studying novels and I always forget to say this and I'm bad about this too. Make sure you don't give away any spoilers. Those of you who have uh read this before, uh with lyric poetry, you know, you read it all at once. There's no such thing as a spoiler and you could talk about the end or you talk about other books, but with this, let's just keep it for the assigned reading.

And this week's reading was just chapters 1 through six. So, as a lecturer, I am more interested in modeling ways of reading. And sometimes this will involve providing a little historical context for Austin's world, as I'll do today, so you can better appreciate the plot. Other times, I'll model some close reading and direct attention to specific passages.

I want to highlight some moments where Austin is particularly funny or insightful, because she often is in her narration because she's so subtle. At times, if you're reading quickly, you'll miss the joke. I'll be highlighting some of those. And most of all, these lectures are just going to give you ways of reading character narration and storytelling that you can take into other novels.

They're going to enhance the way I think you you experience reading novels if that's something you you haven't done before. Um, give you an appreciation of the art, but also Austin's art. Uh, because she really is an amazing artist, as we'll see soon. Let me show you just a picture of Austin here.

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