Mansfield Park: Adaptation as Empathy
In this 7-week long virtual workshop, students will read and discuss Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park and two films related to it: Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, a 1990 comedy of manners set amidst contemporary New York City debutantes with deliberate thematic links to Austen’s novel. Using these films as a jumping off point, Margaret H. Willison will teach students to play with Mansfield Park as adaptors themselves, imagining scenes from new perspectives, in different time periods, with different stakes. Through a combination of group discussion and in-class writing exercises, students will enrich their understanding of the text and develop empathy for even the most frustrating characters.
If you already love Mansfield Park, this is your chance to shout about it. If you have never read the book, this class will be an ideal way to encounter it for the first time. And, last but not least, if you have read but never loved Mansfield Park, consider this an invitation to heal your relationship to it in community. No one is required to know the text deeply or consider it faultless— you just need to believe that it is worthy of serious engagement.
If you would like to be a part of this class, but the cost is prohibitive for you, shoot me an email and we’ll see what we can figure out.
In this 7-week long virtual workshop, students will read and discuss Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park and two films related to it: Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, a 1990 comedy of manners set amidst contemporary New York City debutantes with deliberate thematic links to Austen’s novel. Using these films as a jumping off point, Margaret H. Willison will teach students to play with Mansfield Park as adaptors themselves, imagining scenes from new perspectives, in different time periods, with different stakes. Through a combination of group discussion and in-class writing exercises, students will enrich their understanding of the text and develop empathy for even the most frustrating characters.
If you already love Mansfield Park, this is your chance to shout about it. If you have never read the book, this class will be an ideal way to encounter it for the first time. And, last but not least, if you have read but never loved Mansfield Park, consider this an invitation to heal your relationship to it in community. No one is required to know the text deeply or consider it faultless— you just need to believe that it is worthy of serious engagement.
If you would like to be a part of this class, but the cost is prohibitive for you, shoot me an email and we’ll see what we can figure out.
In this 7-week long virtual workshop, students will read and discuss Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park and two films related to it: Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, a 1990 comedy of manners set amidst contemporary New York City debutantes with deliberate thematic links to Austen’s novel. Using these films as a jumping off point, Margaret H. Willison will teach students to play with Mansfield Park as adaptors themselves, imagining scenes from new perspectives, in different time periods, with different stakes. Through a combination of group discussion and in-class writing exercises, students will enrich their understanding of the text and develop empathy for even the most frustrating characters.
If you already love Mansfield Park, this is your chance to shout about it. If you have never read the book, this class will be an ideal way to encounter it for the first time. And, last but not least, if you have read but never loved Mansfield Park, consider this an invitation to heal your relationship to it in community. No one is required to know the text deeply or consider it faultless— you just need to believe that it is worthy of serious engagement.
If you would like to be a part of this class, but the cost is prohibitive for you, shoot me an email and we’ll see what we can figure out.