Reading: the Jane Austen Book Club

[sartorias]

I read Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club last night--or most of it. I will confess that I skimmed some of the latter portion, so I probably shouldn't discuss it, but what the hey.

Comments

[ex_greythist387]

Yes, exactly, re: wondering. I don't know Austen nearly *finely* enough (once through each of the major novels, haven't gotten to the early work yet), but my little exposure was enough, and recent enough, to cause a few "huh" moments where I disagreed with Fowler's interpretations. Your post suggests that the more deeply one knows Austen's work, the more likely one is to disagree on little important things that one's thought about already. Maybe it's more that Austen fans might find it interesting to see how another Austen fan had rendered things into her own story....

Stock focused on a group of dissidents in eleventh-century France, if I remember correctly, and used the term relative to how they were bound together by their shared experience. I think that for him, things like the Matter of Britain would work differently; participation there isn't reliant upon a particular time. But all of us reading JABC shortly after its publication have some connective links, starting with other stories that subsets of the group have read--Austen's stories as well as those of other writers.

[sartorias]

I think that sounds to me more like the shared memories concept, in that, say, all of us of a certain age who watched Rocky and Bullwinkle and Man from UNCLE as kids are in a subset that shares that memory, even if we never pursue it--never seen another episode--but vague references that surface in the culture are recognizable to us. And if we refer to them in our writing, we're recognizable to one another.

Whereas, in my view, a shared community is one in which one actively chooses to participate: the fanfic circles, frex.

Yes? No? It's already five a.m. but I still haven't had my tea yet.

[ex_greythist387]

Um, something between the two. Deliberate leverage of shared references, as well as some deliberate acclimation to them for a shared purpose: fanfic and similar don't go out to proselytize, exactly. I fear I haven't clarified anything, but I have to wander out into the rain very shortly. (bye!)