Jane Austen & the End of Life (ASL)

Room: Languages & Literature, 1st Floor

In her first talk at Night in the Library, Dr. Wendy Anne Lee spotlights a singularly blessed figure in the history of literature: not Jane Austen, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated throughout the anglophone world, but the Janeite, Austen’s devoted, lifelong reader. A subject of special interest for literary critics and historians, the Janeite interests Dr. Lee for their deep imprinting by Austen’s language. "It is the Janeite at the end of life—the end not only of embodied consciousness but of consciousness structured by six perfect novels—whom I am seeking," Dr. Lee reflects.  

Wendy Anne Lee is associate professor of English at New York University, where she teaches mostly Enlightenment literature & philosophy. She is the author of Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel published by Stanford University Press about the "Bartleby problem" in the history of the novel. With musicologist Brigid Cohen, theater artist Rosemary Quinn, and choreographer Mimi Yin, Wendy also founded Consent Lab at NYU, an arts collaboration devoted to social experimentation and the practice of unease. This talk comes from her current project about the overlap of reading, writing, and dying in lives devoted to Jane Austen.