Academic Program
On Austen
A conversation with St. John's students, conducted in Annapolis, Maryland, April 9, 2003On reason and belief in Pride and Prejudice:
"To me the tension in Jane Austen is a tension between reason and self-centered emotion. The women other than Elizabeth in the Bennett family have very selfish points of view about how the world is going to work for them. Lydia is reckless. Jane has a sunny disposition about things. The struggle that goes on within Elizabeth is the struggle between reason and what she's feeling. The interplay between her emotional self and her rational observation of herself creates the dynamic of the book." -Mr. O'Brien
"Perhaps there are certain subjects that can be reasoned about very strictly and there are others where you'll get yourself into trouble by reasoning too much. For example, trying to reason through the way people act. Perhaps that's not a subject for reason." -Ms. Livari
"Elizabeth is a challenge to what we do at the college, because in society, that is, in conversation, her wit takes over and blinds her. It's when she's by herself that she comes to her senses. It's just the opposite of what we think we're doing. We think we come to some sort of understanding through conversation. Somehow she is kept by a combination of society and her own intelligence from seeing a way through her prejudices. She needs to get away from that. We don't. We think we need to come together." -Mr. Verdi
On belief and prejudice at St. John's:
"There was a forum at the college on "What is the role of belief in inquiry?" One of the things that this forum made me think about was how through this school's program, by picking things apart, you can't help but expose your prejudices or beliefs. That's something I've been surprised at about the college. I never realized that I felt so passionately about certain things until I read, for example, the Bible. I had never really thought about it so much and then I found myself arguing red-faced over certain things that I hadn't even previously known I believed in. That is one interesting way that the college functions." -Ms. Licari
"Elizabeth seems to change over the course of Pride and Prejudice in that she becomes a little more like Jane. Jane seems to be a woman of sentiment. I wonder if you think that at the college, by having one's own beliefs or prejudices exposed, one also changes in feeling? Not just in belief, but in feeling?" -Mr. Verdi
"I don't know if we would really change or really get to know ourselves at the college if the only thing that changed were beliefs that were distant from our feelings or distant from the way we lived our lives. I measure the true changes in my beliefs in the way those changes affect the way I act and feel. I would say that changes in belief are only really important if they affect my happiness and my ability to live the good life. That's shown in Pride and Prejudice very well. Jane Austen is not giving us a model of rational thought. She's giving us a model of happiness or virtue." -Ms. Burns
"You go through such a process at St. John's. Freshman year everything is uprooted. All of your foundations are shaken. You don't know what to think of yourself or what to think of the way you think about things. As a junior I don't really know what's happening to me at this point. Am I becoming more solid in my beliefs or are they getting more and more uncertain?" -Ms. Licari
"It seems that when you begin to examine the patterns of reasoning that have led you to become the person that you are, maybe at that point you keep certain very solid beliefs and discard others. Then as we change, what we do keep of ourselves are things that we know. Like Elizabeth at the end of the novel. She knows herself. Because the part of her that is less thought out has been purged. Through our examining of our beliefs at St. John's we may find we know less than we previously thought, but what we do know becomes more real, more grounded. I feel that I do know myself better as a result of the process." -Ms. Mangum
Participants:
Laura Mangum, Austin, Texas
Melissa Thomas, Decatur, Nebraska
Stuart Bannan, Anchorage, Alaska
Charlene Taylor-Burns, Agua Dulce, California
Jackson O'Brien, Nashville, Tennessee
Meredith Licari, Baltimore, Maryland
Kelly O'Donnell, Ascot, England
Bryson Finklea, Moxville, North Carolina
Rhonda Franklin, Albany, Oregon
John Verdi, tutor
Note - In St. John's seminars, students and tutors address each other by their last names to maintain constant level of decorum in a tightly knit community.
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