Jane Austen and the Ethics of Description

Brett Bourbon received his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he studied literature and philosophy. He was a professor at Stanford for ten years, and is now an Associate professor of English at the University of Dallas. He has received a Fulbright Award, a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Harvard English Scholar Award, and the top teaching awards at both the University of Dallas and Stanford. He is the author of Finding a Replacement for the Soul: Meaning and Mind in Literature and Philosophy (2004), as well as Everyday Poetics: Ethics, Love, and Logic (2022). He has published numerous essays on philosophy, literature, and art. He is also a published poet and fiction writer.

Preface

Part I: Jane Austen and the Powers of Description

1 Disciplines of Description

2 Reading Ignorance into Sense

3 Elizabeth Bennet, the Socrates of Descriptive Reason

4 Frank and Impertinent: Paradiastolic Descriptions

5 An Excursus on Richard Rorty and Lady Catherine

6 Fanny’s Garden Thoughts

7 Reasoning by Description

8 Coda: "Part Hawk, Part Man"

Part II: The Apprehension of Power and Life

Prologue

9 The Cook and the Count: A Psychological Anthropology of Tyranny

10 Is Power Coercive?

11 A Parable of Action and Event

12 The Afflictions of Life: Montale’s Poetic Description of Flux

13 What Is a Life?

14 A Concluding Postscript