Chapter 2 reads Austen’s first novel accepted for publication, Northanger Abbey, in terms of a zero-degree of intelligibility in communicative social exchange. Northanger Abbey presents Catherine Morland’s entry not just to Bath society but into the linguistic public. Throughout the novel, Catherine is subject to stratagems of deceit by her false friends, Isabella and John Thorpe. The latter even makes a coercive (and dishonorably deniable) marriage proposal that Catherine, in a state of absent-minded imaginative distraction, does not so much as uptake as information. J.L. Austin once identified untruth and unclarity as “the birthright” of all speakers. This mock birthright is the arrogation and entitlement of Thorpe. In a striking alignment of this kind of threat with its obverse – a critical investment of interest, if not fascination – Cavell explains his renewed reading of Austen only late in life as an exhausted intimacy with minor characters. In the tedious, packed rooms of Bath where nothing meaningful may happen, or originate, the main couple, Catherine and Henry, broach the possibility of intimacy through the precondition of the apartness of other minds.

The Introduction, “On Criticism and other middle subjects,” presents the argument of J.L. Austin’s (1947–’48) Jane Austen-inspired lectures published as Sense and Sensibilia. Austin sharply criticizes, even satirizes, the dummy presentation of “medium-sized dry goods” in his era’s dominant positivist philosophy of sense data, countering the picture of the world of things as a dry-goods store from an affirmatively critical vantage within the same medium-scale world, in terms of the ready-to-hand. In Sense and Sensibilia, Austin argues that by seeking a single kind of statement about knowledge that is incorrigible (i.e., not subject to doubt or to further challenge, incapable of being proved wrong in any context), the sense data theory of perception seeks not so much knowledge as to eliminate all risk. The chapter situates Austin’s practice of linguistic phenomenology in terms of the near-contemporary construction of the history of literary criticism by I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism as a history of “middle subjects.”

Chapter 3, “Sense and Sensibility and Suffering,” begins from the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the problem of other minds. Wittgenstein, like Adam Smith, positions suffering and pain as the paradigmatic experiences in discussion of other minds. (Austin’s paradigmatic feeling is anger.) This chapter deploys a flattened point of view in terms of what it means to be “insensible,” particularly in relation to the non-human paper and ink fictional characters in an “early” Austen novel. It also provides close reading of Sense and Sensibility through a Cavellian exploration of the philosophical problems of skepticism and acknowledgment. Cavell presents his own reading of late Wittgenstein as one of an intimate frustration with the workings of criteria. Such an experience models a necessarily and potentially productive frustration that modern novel readers often report with the main character/trait pairings of Sense and Sensibility. The chapter promotes the interest of otherwise flat writing as modeling forms of resiliency. These critical practices are especially vital to reading Austen’s fiction before her great success in writing novels of inwardness.