Nonsense and Insensibility
Bennett retreated to his study. He opened a volume on Jane Austen. She was a favorite of his, and integral to his study of pastoralism and the nation-state, but he had a feeling that this critical tome, Undoing Jane Austen: Non-Sense and Post-Semiotic Sensibility, would do little to enhance his appreciation. Indeed, he had been putting it off for weeks. “Introduction,” he read cautiously, and then continued . . .
This work is predicated on the premise, now widely accepted, that “Jane Austen” operates within the semiotics of postmodern Western (and by imperialist extension, global) culture as at once a symbol of the hegemonic norms of British imperialism, and, through the heterosexualist conspiracies of her plots and their various perpetuations (in films, “critical editions,” etc. . . . ) as a naturalizing fetish of Western romance, or rather, the naturalized power relations purporting to operate as “romantic” signifiers within the imperialist, heterosexualist matrices of the postmodern West.
Bennett slammed the book shut, his stomach churning like the writer’s prose. He heard Chloe and Lizzy come in.
“Do we have to?” Lizzy was whining.
“Come on. He owes us this,” Chloe said grimly, and a moment later she presented herself and daughter in the doorway of Bennett’s study.
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