Join Evelyne Ender in this exploration of questions and reflections of Jane Austen's works. This mini-course is shaped as a set of interrelated lectures. Their aim is to explore questions that will be unraveled along a common thread. From the instructor: "My presentations will, each in their own way, respond to the following challenge: if, as the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote, the Enlightenment saw 'an explosion of speech aimed at persuading others,' how can novels persuade us at a time of crisis to rethink – without sentimentality but with the help of reason and imagination – our relation to ourselves and to others?" The bold move, here, is to imagine that characters can become proxies for this kind of investigation, trusting all the while that fiction can enlighten us, even on that small map drawn by a woman author who could not travel.

For lectures 2, 3, and 4 recommended short readings from Austen’s novel can be found here: http://file.dev.jhu.edu/ALUM/HopkinsatHome/JAustenTimesBib.pdf

Dr. Evelyne Ender is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her doctorate ès lettres at the University of Geneva, where she taught for several years. Her dissertation appeared in 1991 as Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in literature as well as in the medical humanities, and she is currently finishing a book on handwriting.

Her passion for texts and for the creative potential of literature nourish her interdisciplinary research as well as her teaching. Body-mind issues and the psychological aspects of human existence represented in modern fiction and autobiography are at heart of her work. This course reflects her research on gender, on personal memory, illness and hysteria, the science on reading, and on desire. A Professor of French at the University of Washington in Seattle, she came to JHU from the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College in New York. She has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, and MIT.

Ender’s ArchiTexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2005) won the Aldo Scaglione Prize for best book in Comparative studies. Her many articles and book chapters in English and French are driven by one conviction, namely that an ever-renewed attentiveness to what words and language(s) can tell us is key to our humanity.

Event page: https://events.jhu.edu/form/hahjaneausten