"What Have You Been Judging From?": Subjectivity and Judgment in Jane Austen's Novels and George Eliot's Middlemarch
Abstract
This study draws on critical sources such as Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Benjamin’s
essay “The Storyteller”, and on the ideas of Aristotle, Arendt, and
Murdoch, among others, to examine the structures – such as dialogue, free indirect
style, irony,
and narrative intrusions — through which Austen and Eliot depict social interaction,
subjectivity,
and deliberation in their novels. Chapter One explores the problems of judgment which
these
structures stage in Austen, and suggests that Austen presents successful judgment
as arising
dialectically from the conflict between external restriction of speech and internal
freedom of
reflection. Chapter Two argues that the experience of (temporally distorted) epistolary
communication provides Austen’s characters with a template for further critical introspection.
Chapter Three considers Eliot’s mixed response to the modes of understanding the world
staged in the nineteenth-century novel's structures of subjectivity and judgment.
The study finds that while Austen and Eliot present opposite models for transcending
the limitations of subjectivity, both use the novel form to emphasize the moral importance
of everyday deliberation.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
EnglishPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/3213Citation
Stern, Rachel (2011). "What Have You Been Judging From?": Subjectivity and Judgment in Jane Austen's Novels
and George Eliot's Middlemarch. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/3213.Collections
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