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Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen, and Thick Description
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Journal Article
Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen, and Thick Description
2022
Overview
Jane Austen’s novels are interested in concepts. This much is clear from their titles. But the relationship between concept and narrative can be unclear, despite a tradition of reducing one or more characters to types of a Theophrastian sort. This essay turns to a triad of Gilbert Ryle’s late-career essays for an alternative account. Ryle was a leading midcentury metaphysician, and a lifelong reader of the divine Miss Jane. Late in his career, while pondering the relationship between action and thought, he coined the term “thick description” subsequently popularized by Clifford Geertz. This essay argues for Austen’s employment of concepts as descriptive thickeners in the Rylean and Geertzean sense, and against attempts to attach Austen’s characters (or characters in the way we usually mean the word) to Theophrastian types. Its example is “pride” in Pride and Prejudice.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Subject
