see it as a variegated response to the experience of modernity

Dropping the taboo on treating characters as if they were real won’t tell us what questions to ask or how to go about answering them. Nor will it tell us what books we should now embrace and try to canonize. Dropping the taboo just increases our freedom to be whatever kind of critic we wish to be, to work on the kind of writing we care about, in ways that make intellectual sense to us. But such freedom can feel scary, for now we have to find our own way forward. To echo a theme in Cavell’s work: we need to “stake our own subjectivity” in our writing. This doesn’t mean that we have to become painfully private. A critic’s confessions may be fascinating, but the place to reveal them is not necessarily in an essay on Jane Austen. To stake oneself in one’s writing means, rather, to try to acknowledge, as far as possible, what our own investments in a topic are. These investments may well be intensely intellectual, but they are no less personal for all that. There is a lot to be said about this. Here and now, I’ll just explain what I want to do now that I have understood what’s at stake in the taboo.