Original scientific paper
Jane Austen and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Education of the Focalizing Consciousness
Tatjana Jukić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Jane Austen's novels seem to be specimen stories of containment and regulation. Indeed, Austen articulated a turning point in the history of the novel by processing the narrative excesses of the eighteenth-century novel into an educated narrative intelligence, whose coherence resides in the invention of the focalizing consciousness. The focalizing consciousness keeps the novel together by attracting different narrative excesses to itself, as an instance where the boundary keeps breaking between the narrator and the story, so that the excess is contained in this break, now as a demand that a subjectivity be forged with a sole purpose of translating excess into education.
Pride and Prejudice (1813) may be critical in this sense, because it is in this novel that Austen mobilizes her focalizing consciousness not merely around the processing of narrative excess into education, but also around an insight that excess remains residual to an education thus conceived, now as an excess in the very intelligence that is instrumental to this process. The title indicates as much, because both pride and prejudice point to an excess in the intellectual processes and to an overvaluation of consciousness. This suggests that the subjectivation invoked by the novel does not coincide fully with the novel’s constitution, and that an emphatic narrative emancipation runs parallel to the invention of the focalizing consciousness: this being how the novel is identified as a privileged site of modern psychopolitics in the nineteenth century.
Keywords
Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice; the novel; the focalizing consciousness; metonymy; psychopolitics
Hrčak ID:
238157
URI
Publication date:
21.5.2020.
Visits: 1.332 *