EN3PA: Placing Jane Austen

Module code: EN3PA

Module provider: English Literature; School of Humanities

Credits: 20

Level: Level 3 (Honours)

When you'll be taught: Semester 1

Module convenor: Dr Paddy Bullard, email: p.s.bullard@reading.ac.uk

Module co-convenor: Professor Gail Marshall, email: g.marshall@reading.ac.uk

Pre-requisite module(s): Before taking this module, you must have at least 40 credits of EN-coded modules at Part 1 (except for visiting students). (Open)

Co-requisite module(s):

Pre-requisite or Co-requisite module(s):

Module(s) excluded:

Placement information: NA

Academic year: 2024/5

Available to visiting students: Yes

Talis reading list: Yes

Last updated: 21 May 2024

Overview

Module aims and purpose

Jane Austen once compared her art to that of the miniaturist: each of her novels, she wrote, was like a ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. But the relatively small scale of her writing in terms of setting – its tendency to domestic portraits and family groupings – belies the expansiveness and mobility of her imagination. Austen had a vivid sense of the wider world in which she lived. Her meticulously realised interiors are set carefully within larger landscapes, and both are full of social, economic and aesthetic meaning. Her characters move between great houses and ordinary cottages, between city and suburb, between old agricultural estates and newly landscaped parklands, between familiar parishes and fashionable tourist destinations.  

Austen scholars have also explored wider backgrounds to her fiction: the ocean journeys of her naval officer relatives (and their equivalents in her novels); the colonial slave plantations that paid for those stately country homes. This module investigates Austen’s sense of space and place. It examines the movements of her characters through rooms and houses, the patterns of their dances in assembly halls, the paths of their journeys through town and country. It investigates how these movements sometimes represent changes of heart or class, of mind or fortune. It shows how they are always significant for the carefully drawn lines of her narratives. 

The aim of this module is for students to explore Jane Austen’s works in a variety of genres, including her published novels, and her letters, juvenilia, and unfinished final works. Students will also learn about theories of place, including landscape studies, the geography of everyday life, histories of domesticity, regional studies, environmentalism, ideas of gendered and otherwise socially constructed space, the history of travel and transport, the anthropology of space, and the history of nations and empires. The module encourages students to consider the interpretative potential of these theories for Austen's literary art, at figural, linguistic and/ or narratological levels. For example, what does it mean to know or to lose one's place in an Austen novel? To what extent are her characters confined within prison-houses of language? How does the physical displacement of characters relate to narrative framing? 

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, it is expected that students will be able to:

1. Apply discipline-specific practices of close reading, interpretative analysis and critical argument
2. Distinguish and evaluate different research methods, themes, and theoretical debates in current literary studies
3. Respond creatively and imaginatively to essay questions and research tasks, for the purpose of devising and sustaining arguments, and of reaching decisive judgments
4. Articulate their own and other people’s ideas concisely, accurately, and clearly

Module content

Students on this module will engage in detailed study of up to four of Jane Austen's six completed novels. Set texts may include Northanger Abbey (1818), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), or Persuasion (1818). In addition to four set novels, students will study selections from Austen's unfinished fictions, which may include The Watsons (1804) and Sanditon (1817), from her drafts, letters and juvenilia, and from historical documents, which may include James Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen. 

Lectures will introduce histories, theories and interdisciplinary themes of space and place. Selections from historical documents (which may include Gilpin on the picturesque) and from writings by theorists of space and place (which may include Doreen Massey, Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan or Tim Ingold) will be made available through Blackboard. Seminars will interrogate these histories and theories with respect to particular texts. 

Structure

Teaching and learning methods

The module is taught in a combination of lectures and seminars involving structured group discussion for which students are required to do preparatory reading. These sessions are designed to work together to form a coherent learning experience, by means of their single-author focus and orientation towards a particular theoretical theme. Students are entitled to request a tutorial on their formative assignment.

Study hours

At least 33 hours of scheduled teaching and learning activities will be delivered in person, with the remaining hours for scheduled and self-scheduled teaching and learning activities delivered either in person or online. You will receive further details about how these hours will be delivered before the start of the module.

Please note the independent study hours above are notional numbers of hours; each student will approach studying in different ways. We would advise you to reflect on your learning and the number of hours you are allocating to these tasks.

Semester 1 The hours in this column may include hours during the Christmas holiday period.

Semester 2 The hours in this column may include hours during the Easter holiday period.

Summer The hours in this column will take place during the summer holidays and may be at the start and/or end of the module.

Assessment

Requirements for a pass

Students need to achieve an overall module mark of 40% to pass this module.

Summative assessment

Penalties for late submission of summative assessment

The Support Centres will apply the following penalties for work submitted late:

Assessments with numerical marks

• where the piece of work is submitted after the original deadline (or any formally agreed extension to the deadline): 10% of the total marks available for that piece of work will be deducted from the mark for each working day (or part thereof) following the deadline up to a total of three working days;
• the mark awarded due to the imposition of the penalty shall not fall below the threshold pass mark, namely 40% in the case of modules at Levels 4-6 (i.e. undergraduate modules for Parts 1-3) and 50% in the case of Level 7 modules offered as part of an Integrated Masters or taught postgraduate degree programme;
• where the piece of work is awarded a mark below the threshold pass mark prior to any penalty being imposed, and is submitted up to three working days after the original deadline (or any formally agreed extension to the deadline), no penalty shall be imposed;
• where the piece of work is submitted more than three working days after the original deadline (or any formally agreed extension to the deadline): a mark of zero will be recorded.

Assessments marked Pass/Fail

• where the piece of work is submitted within three working days of the deadline (or any formally agreed extension of the deadline): no penalty will be applied;
• where the piece of work is submitted more than three working days after the original deadline (or any formally agreed extension of the deadline): a grade of Fail will be awarded.

The University policy statement on penalties for late submission can be found at: https://www.reading.ac.uk/cqsd/-/media/project/functions/cqsd/documents/qap/penaltiesforlatesubmission.pdf

You are strongly advised to ensure that coursework is submitted by the relevant deadline. You should note that it is advisable to submit work in an unfinished state rather than to fail to submit any work.

Formative assessment

Formative assessment is any task or activity which creates feedback (or feedforward) for you about your learning, but which does not contribute towards your overall module mark.

The formative assignment, which does not contribute to the overall module mark, will be a short take-home examination. Students will be asked to write a single essay answer of 1000 words. They will have 48 hours from the release of the questions on Blackboard in which to complete their answer, and to upload it to the submission point on Turnitin. 

Reassessment

Additional costs