Style: Volume 41, No. 3, Fall 2007 275 Lisa Zunshine University of Kentucky Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It Something happened to the novel “around the time of Jane Austen” (vii) argues George Butte in his compelling reintroduction of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on phenomenology into contemporary literary and film studies, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. English writers began to portray a multiply-layered and mutually-reflecting subjectivity, deep intersubjectivity, a “change so subtle and fundamental that it has been difficult to conceive and describe” (25), particularly as today we take its impact for granted in the prose of George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian McEwan, and others. Butte defines deep intersubjectivity as the web of partially interpenetrating consciousnesses that exists wherever perceiving subjects, that is, human beings, collect. [T]he process begins when a self perceives the gestures, either of body or word, of another consciousness, and it continues when the self can perceive in those gestures an awareness of her or his own gestures. Subsequently the self, upon revealing a consciousness of the other’s response, perceives yet another gesture responding to its response, so that out of this conversation of symbolic behaviours emerges a web woven from elements of mutually exchanged consciousnesses. (27) For a vivid early example of deep intersubjectivity, Butte turns to the episode in Austen’s Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot witnesses a silent but poignant com-mu- nication between her former suitor, Frederick Wentworth, and her sister, Elizabeth, who run into each other in Molland’s bakery shop: It did not surprise, but it grieved Anne to observe that Elizabeth would not know [Wen- tworth]. She saw that he saw Elizabeth, that Elizabeth saw him, that there was complete internal recognition on each side; she was convinced that he was ready to be acknowledged as an acquaintance, expecting it, and she had the pain of seeing her sister turn away with unalterable coldness. (117) According to Butte, When Anne Elliot watches Wentworth and Elizabeth negotiating complex force fields of memory and protocol, the enabling strategy of her story is a new layering of human consciousness, or a new representation of those subjectivities as layered in a specific way.