An afternoon with Jane Austen

Sunday, November 11, 2012

2:00-4:00 PM

English Building, Room 274

Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw  Georgia

 

Professor Patricia Michaelson reprised the talk that she gave this year at the JASNA AGM in NYC for us. We had a lot of fun with the audience participation portion!  Several students in Professor Laura Dabundo's class joined us.  There program:

The Power of Speech; or,

Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?

When Austen wrote dialogue for General Tilney and for Miss Bates, she wasn't just contrasting two individual characters; she was engaging the cultural norms of her time that specified how to speak like a (powerful) man or a (powerless) woman. In this informal session, participants will learn which features of dialogue "mark" these qualities and will practice speaking in different roles. And if you're ready for an even greater challenge, we'll try powerless men (Mr. Woodhouse) and powerful women (Lady Catherine de Bourgh).

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Pat Michaelson teaches literature at the University of Texas at Dallas and is the author of Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen.
 

An interdisciplinary study of women and language in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Speaking Volumes focuses on the connections that contemporaries made between speech and reading. It studies the period's discourses on "woman's language" and contrasts them with the linguistic practices of individual women. The book also argues that the oral performance of literature was important in fostering domesticity and serving as a means for women to practice authoritative speech.