Jane Austen and Other Minds : Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction

Jane Austen and Other Minds offers a lively reintroduction to all six of Austen's finished novels through an ambitious choice to pair analysis of her novelistic ordinary language — her style, conversation, and moral thought — with the major practitioners of twentieth-century ordinary language philosophy, including J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell.

Jane Austen''s fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen''s fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell''s choice of Austen as a means to pursue ''passionate exchange,'' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.