LATEST PROJECTS
Jane Austen's Emma
Philosophical Perspectives
Jane Austen's Emma is many things to many readers but it is as inaccurate as it is reductive to consider it just a romance. The minutia of daily living on which it concentrates permit not a rehearsal of platitudes, but a closer look at human emotions and motives, as well as the opportunity to hone our interpretive and empathetic skills. Emma flies in the face of conventional notions of femininity by presenting a heroine with hubris. It shows how friendships can affect one's ways of dealing with the world, how shame can reconfigure self-understanding, how gossip functions in sustaining a community. Emma rehabilitates conceptions of romance by rejecting melodrama in favor of naturalism. It explores the waywardness of the imagination and the myriad ways in which different people with different biases and agendas may evaluate the same evidence. It dwells on the limits of autonomy in that it explores the ease with which one may submit to the will of another.
Part of the Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature. Available from Oxford University Press.
Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume
A compelling exploration of the convergence of Jane Austen’s literary themes and characters with David Hume’s views on morality and human nature.
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Argues that the normative perspectives endorsed in Jane Austen's novels are best characterized in terms of a Humean approach, and that the merits of Hume's account of ethical, aesthetic and epistemic virtue are vividly illustrated by Austen's writing.
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Illustrates how Hume and Austen complement one another, each providing a lens that allows us to expand and elaborate on the ideas of the other
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Proposes that literature may serve as a thought experiment, articulating hypothetical cases which allow the reader to test her moral intuitions
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Contributes to ongoing debates on the philosophy of literature, ethics, and emotion
What's Hecuba to Him?: Fictional Events and Actual Emotions
This book engages contemporary debate over the seeming irrationality or inauthenticity of our emotional response to fiction, examining the many positions taken in this debate and arguing that we can understand the relation between cognition and emotion without devaluing our emotional responses to fiction. It takes Hamlet's famous query as the first step in an analytic philosophical inquiry and, by considering some of the answers that derive from that question, arrives at a set of necessary conditions for an emotional response to fiction.