Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction

Description

Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

Eric Reid Lindstrom is the author of Romantic Fiat: Demystification and Enchantment in Lyric Poetry (2011), and editor of Stanley Cavell and the Event of Romanticism (2014). His essays on Jane Austen, Romantic and modern poetry, ordinary language, and philosophical poetics have appeared widely in academic journals. He lives in Vermont and Louisiana.