Austen

Weren’t we supposed to read some Jane Austen for this month? Having never read any Austen, and always confusing her and all those Brontes, I got started on Pride and Prejudice. I made it 27% of the way through. Sadly, those are hours I will never get back.

Despite the fun I generally make of the Victorianists, I actually quite like a lot of Victorian literature and, when I was an undergraduate trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I considered focusing on Victorian texts for my honours project. I like Dickens very much. Great Expectations is probably the only book I’ve read twice—once in En-ger-land: a paperback copy I bought in Winchester on a rainy December day while the aunt I was visiting went to the panto. I first read about Pip et al. during one of those unfortunate teenaged phases in which I attempted to, as Eliot says we must, obtain some tradition through great labour. Being a real rebel, I read the Iliad around the same time and remember being terribly disappointed that the only response I had to it was a genuine enjoyment of the endless battles. I think that’s still my only response. Whatever the importance of the Iliad, I do now know that nothing at all happens in the first 27% of Pride and Prejudice. No one even dies of consumption.

The most interesting thing about reading P+P was that I read what I did of it on a Kobo ereader (that’s how I can be so certain that I read 27%). It’s very strange to read a big thick book on a screen that looks like paper and holds a thousand books but is only a quarter-inch thick. People interested in new media and the-history-of-the-book are surely thinking about these things. I also had a strange worry that I was not reading a “good” copy of the novel—maybe whoever entered the text for Project Gutenberg had got some things wrong, or maybe there were typos, or maybe there were battles that had been edited out. One can only hope.

Thinking about reading etexts reminded me that there were other readings for this month. Like Jeff, I have no idea what “ethics” is or means (that’s what you said, right Jeff?). I remember Pete in The Examined Life talking about vegetarians and spending money while he strolled the streets of New York in what were undoubtedly expensive leather shoes. Ethics seems to be about common sense, some form of collective guilt and/or shame, and a reiteration of the Golden Rule (or Might is Right). Confusingly, ethics seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. My connection now to etexts seems a stretch, but I was left wondering about the ethics of reading downloaded books—not the ones that are in the public domain, like P+P, but the ones that are obtained otherwise. Of course it’s a copyright issue, but wouldn’t the copyright holders (monsters?) claim that there’s an ethical background to copyright? This seems especially pertinent given that our texts on ethics, etc. for this month were scanned and emailed around to us all. As I (barely) understand it, this method of distributing texts to students is no longer ethical/allowed. I would very much like someone to explain this shift in departmental (or is it university?) policy to me—not even explain the supposed rationale for the shift or anything that in-depth but actually fill me in on what happened over the Christmas break. I suspect these answers will provoke many questions related to McIntyre's ideas about institutions, practices, and internal and external goods.