ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I have on many occasions mentioned here the series of lectures I delivered at UNC Chapel Hill, one on the thought of Karl Marx and another on The Critique of Pure Reason, which were recorded by a graduate student, Alexander Campbell, and then posted on YouTube. But I am not sure that I have been spoken that much about the first series of 10 lectures that I delivered on the subject of Ideological Critique. I recorded these myself, using a little camcorder I purchased at Best Buy along with a lapel mic. I set the camcorder up on my desk in my study at Meadowmont Village, and then deliver the lectures to nobody at all. The first three lectures dealt with Karl Mannheim’s great work, Ideology and Utopia. The next four focused on Edwin Wilmsen’s devastating critique of ethnography, Land Filled with Flies. The eighth and ninth lectures were devoted to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s early and quite impressive work, The Signifying Monkey. All of those, I am quite confident, are worth your attention.  But it is the last lecture, the 10^th, that is the subject of this post. Rather unexpectedly, it deals with Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, or more precisely, with Edward Said’s construal of that novel as being about slavery. Some words of explanation are called for.

 

In 1993, Said published a collection of essays about British literature entitled Culture and Imperialism. As one might expect, he devoted chapters to such novelists as Rudyard Kipling, but rather surprisingly, he included an essay on Mansfield Park.  In 1999, the Canadian film director Patricia Rozema did a marvelous film of Mansfield Park starring, among others, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas. Susie and I saw the movie in a downtown Amherst art theater (if, indeed, one can really speak of “downtown” Amherst.) It was immediately obvious to me that Rozema had been deeply influenced by Said’s essay. Some while later, I was invited by my big sister, Barbara, to speak at a meeting of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI, in Washington, DC. I chose as my subject Jane Austen as interpreted by Said and rendered by Rozema.  In the course of doing some background research for the talk, I came to the conclusion that Said was in fact quite correct in his reading, even though he seems not to have known the historical details that I dug up. When I gave a series of lectures on Ideological Critique, I decided to include a version of that lecture as a coda.

 

If you have an interest in ideological critique or in Jane Austen or in Edward Said, or indeed in Patricia Rozema, I recommend the lecture to you. It is only a bit more than 30 minutes long but I think is worth your time.

 

One word of explanation. I found so disorienting the experience of lecturing to nobody at all that after the first of my 10 lectures I conceived the fiction of inviting to each lecture one of the men or women who had been my students over the decades. By the time I reached the last in the series, I was calling the name (as I learn to say in an Afro-American studies department) of nine of my former students.

You can find the YouTube lecture here.