Existential Pioneers. 16. Jane Austen. Inner Circle Seminar 197 (17 November 2013)



Jane Austen
by her sister Cassandra

Existential Pioneers

16. Jane Austen
(16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817)
The existential genius of her novels 200 years on

Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 197
Sunday 17 November 2013
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.



Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) is the author of a small number of much loved novels. Two hundred years ago this year, for example, she published Pride and Prejudice (1813) and worked on and completed Mansfield Park (1814). In his book The Great Tradition (1948), the literary critic F. R. Leavis places her first among the first four ‘great English novelists’. However, Vladimir Nabokov, who prided himself on being a ‘good reader’ and ‘re-reader’, in his Lectures on Literature (1980), while praising her subtlety and precision, ends by patronising ‘her delicate patterns’, ‘her collection of eggshells in cotton wool’, as ‘a charming rearrangement of old-fashioned values’. But was Nabokov not missing something? Was not Miss Austen a great existential pioneer? Do not her subtle and insightful explorations of complex human relationships, in unsurpassed ordinary (though extraordinary) English, exemplify true existential thinking? Is the later, lumbering language of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century existential philosophers and psychotherapists such an advance? You are invited to bring your own examples from Jane Austen’s novels for discussion.

Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £116, others £145, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com

For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.