Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 20.1 (1899) 108-113 (at 108): With all our advance in scientific astronomy, the average modern man is not so familiar with the sky as was his antique brother, and some of the blunders in modern works of fiction that are scored from time to time in scientific journals would hardly have been possible for a ploughman of antiquity, not to say a sailor. The world needs every now and then a reminder that the modern head holds different things from the ancient brain-pan, not necessarily more.

Using a very different theoretical approach, Robbins (2009a) suggests that one of the primary reasons for Pentecostal expansion among those most disenfranchised by late capitalism may very well be the ease with which this religion creates social cohesion despite the ‘institutional deficit’ of the neoliberal global order (B. Martin 1998: 117‐18

The keen feeling of hazard and loss that attends Elizabeth’s point of view—the caution Jane gives her that Elizabeth’s habit of interpretation will “ruin [her] happiness”—is lost in a critical interpretation that celebrates her character as a representative of either social progress, cultural conservation or aesthetic consolidation.

This “Jane Austen,” the author of a body of texts that circulated across four continents within decades of their publication in England, has a less obvious relationship to the western ideal of the liberal autonomous individual

subjective orientation toward freedom, progress, and self-growth that is so clearly formative for Elizabeth Bennet is not taken for granted by Austen as normative for all women. Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins and expects to live a fulfilling life with him. Conscious of Elizabeth’s differing views, Charlotte anticipates being hurt by her friend’s disapprobation, but makes no excuses for her marriage as an act martyrdom or of submis-sion to crushing necessity

While the varieties of couples and companions demonstrate Austen’s interest in multiple modes of intimacy, for Elizabeth, Charlotte’s deviancy from “proper” intimacy in one area of her life disqualifies her in another.

One of the most powerful effects of Austen’s novel is to show how attitudes toward marriage provide overriding norms that dictate forms of intimacy outside those cultivated within the conjugal couple.

Elizabeth treats Charlotte’s marriage as a form of moral deviancy

Charlotte’s marginalization highlights the limitations that Elizabeth’s views about intimacy place on her emotional and intel-lectual curiosity.43 Austen reminds us of the lack of communication between the two former friends by having Elizabeth hypothesize at the end of her visit that she knows Charlotte’s real feelings, though they go unvoiced: “Poor Charlotte!—it was melancholy to leave her to such society!—But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion” (P, 233). Though Woloch argues that Elizabeth, by this point in the novel (after visiting Rosings and having read Darcy’s revealing letter) “has become the consciousness around which the novel—as a totality—is oriented,” Elizabeth’s parting interpretation of Charlotte’s inner life offers another example of Elizabeth reading social situations aslant: she is confident Charlotte is “evidently regret-ting” her departure, but perplexed that not only does Charlotte not ask for compassion, but she does not even seem to.

But, Charlotte’s cathexis of marriage as an institution stands in striking comparison to Elizabeth’s acute surprise at her own hidden internal depths and her sudden discovery of a change of heart about the object of her affection. Charlotte does not experience a sudden change of heart, nor does she acknowledge that fear of approaching middle age prompted her sudden engagement, since I think we are supposed to believe her (Elizabeth certainly does), when she reveals “marriage has always been [her] object.”

Charlotte seems to inhabit the worst of both worlds; even in the domestic sphere her movements, conversation, and enjoy-ment are all checked.

From Charlotte’s perspective, personal fulfillment, growth, and happiness progress (or regress) with equal precariousness inside or outside the couple, and a loving marriage appears to her as an external, only occasionally relevant condition of her future internal well-being. Marriage is a tolerable constraint within which her flour-ishing does not have to be seriously curtailed.

Defending her future against the claims of the present (her embarrassing family, her disappointing friend), means that the future expands, freed of its current burdens, to accommodate a future self who will have grown with “greater importance” and a future couple whose mutual progress demands a marital space purified of all intrusions.

By doing just what she ought, Charlotte falls short of what Elizabeth would have a self-respecting woman do: surpass expectations by getting the more pedestrian ones wrong. She later gets Darcy to admit that his attraction flourished under her practice of not trying to please. Much of the flirtation between Darcy and Elizabeth draws on a mutual desire not to meet expectations

Elizabeth’s process of self-realization through discovering how wrong she was is consistent with her more general practice of negatively inhabiting social expectations. Her course of self-affirmation through negation is opposite to that of Charlotte Lucas, who, despite her age and appearance, surprises and overjoys her family by doing just what young ladies are supposed to do and what everyone supposed she would fail to do: marry.

Elizabeth’s discontent stems from the way that she grafts individual choice onto social forms. Marriage, for Elizabeth, should not be defined by its being an omnipresent social form; it should be made meaningful by the intentions behind it.

older woman reminds Elizabeth, that to call such ubiquitous events injurious is to place mistaken emphasis on what is merely ordinary

Elizabeth’s confidence that “independent” young men with “indepen-dent” fortunes always act freely is undercut at several points by the sly Austenian voice, who lauds “the fire and independence of [Mr. Collins’s] character”

******

Austen’s work might instead be interpreted as the scene of agonistic coexistence in which the discus-sions between Elizabeth and Charlotte and the deterioration of their friendship animate competing conceptions of self, moral agency, and modes of affective living

Charlotte Lucas offers a compelling point of departure for bringing the critical perspective of “multiple [ / ] modernities” into eighteenth-century novel studies.

development of modern subjectivity, where the modern subject is assumed to be oriented toward freedom and inner-directed action, overlooks some of the most intriguing aspects of disagreements among women in Austen’s novels and foregoes an opportunity, which becomes more pertinent to feminists every day, to make the novel relevant to subjects and especially to female subjectivities whose self-cultivation takes the form of perseverance, self-discipline, and the daily prac-tice of living in accordance with social practices that do not appear germane to liberation. Charlotte Lucas presents conceptual challenges to feminist theorists and gender analysts because her expectations do not fit those of a romantic plot.

Austen develops heroines like Elizabeth Bennet to be ambassadors for novelistic generic acceptance at the same time that they are agents of social reform. The marriage plot is the exemplary union of both, carried forward by Elizabeth Bennet as the upwardly mobile bourgeois female subject who becomes responsible for the modernization of aristocratic culture into which she is accepted.

In the tradition of feminist criticism I’ve been discussing, the Austenian heroine and her romantic choices are exemplary not only of the modern individual, but also the novel genre, so that the interaction between genre and indi-vidual agency unfolds through the marriage plot

Austen exposed the patriarchal conditions of her historical moment and the way romantic conventions coded for power and wealth, while simultaneously using the constraints of her provincial and domestic settings to her advantage, demonstrating the duplicitous aptitude of romantic narratives to make those conditions visible

My focus on Charlotte Lucas resonates with recent critical trends that depart from the assumption that the novel’s telos, particularly as revealed in the courtship plot, is the representation of personhood through characterological depth and interiority

Narratives have limited resources—formal development, narrative attention, and thematic social goods—that are unequally distributed between protagonists and minor characters. In the process of being “minored,” the many clarify the one; in Pride and Prejudice, minor characters “contribut[e] to the development of Elizabeth’s consciousness.”5 As Elizabeth’s close friend and, in many ways, catalyst for her development, Charlotte is both a minor character par excel-lence and a register of the costs of such a system of individuation

Yet, Charlotte’s stance is important to think through two hundred years later as a reminder of the multiplicity of attitudes toward intimacy, conjugality, and self-fulfillment in Austen’s fiction. This multiplicity remains unstudied by a tradition of Austen criticism that too often remains bound, even in contemporary feminist forms, to the analytic and prescriptive parameters of liberal personhood as those are under-stood to have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.

Bohr’s philosophy-physics (the twowere inseparable for him)

As a community, they had evaded most of the standards of modernity for a community: they lacked a full literacy rate, did not possess a written language or written history, and pertained to ritual practice as a primary mode of expression and entertainment.

System A is all about integrity and health and the folk not as nodes in a machine, but as a growing, adapting, distributed and living whole. It is the difference between a neighborhood and a housing development.

There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses                                       If there were water

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

 As Neil Selwyn (2013) notes, the expansion of technology (and the rise of EdTech) coincides with a growth in libertarian ideals and neoliberal governmental policies, a one-two punch of individual exceptionalism and belief in the power of the outsider.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” 

people in other countries should be seen primarily as rivals to be defeated.

But I have emphasized many times that ”modernism” carries with it another idea, that of emancipation from some stagnant, archaic and stifling past, so that ”modern” is always a way to orient action according to an arrow of time that distinguishes the past from the future. An essential component of the concept of modernity is the idea of a future toward which we travel after a radical rupture with the past.

Now for the definition of ”nature”. I think we could easily agree in this assembly that since nature is not ”wilderness” nor the outside, nor the harmonious providential balance, nor any sort of cybernetic machine, nor the opposite of artificial or technical, it would be much more expedient to forget entirely the word “nature” or to use it in William James’ definition: ”nature is but a name for excess”.