In the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism, the existence of all literatures relies on what is called a text; it includes oral literature, a term that largely refers to literature disseminated orally. Before its dissemination, however, the text of oral literature, which can be properly termed as “brain text,” is stored in the human brain. By brain text, what is referred to is the textual form used for storytelling before writing symbols were created and used to record information; it has continued to exist even after the creation of such symbols. Other types of texts exist apart from brain text, such as written and electronic text; but brain text, in particular, consists of brain concepts, which, depending on its different sources, can be divided into picture concepts and abstract concepts. Brain concepts are tools for thinking that derive from understanding and applying brain concepts; in this sense, brain text is the carrier of thought. Once brain concepts stop being made, it means thinking has been completed. Thinking produces thoughts that can be stored in the brain in the form of brain text, which determines thinking and behavioral patterns that not only communicate and disseminate information but also guide a person’s ideas, thoughts, judgments, choices, actions, and emotions. To some degree, brain text affects a person’s lifestyle and ethical behaviors. In fact, brain text can control people’s thoughts and actions and most importantly, determine who they are.

The art of irony and the philosophy of happiness are seamlessly intertwined in Emma, constituting a profound response to Enlightenment modernity. Within the framework of the “fugue of happiness,” Jane Austen engages in a philosophical inquiry into the nature, meaning, forms, and pathways to happiness through literary narrative, revealing the rupture between cognitive and ethical dimensions of happiness under the symptoms of modernity. Addressing this rupture, Austen transforms irony into a poetic device to deconstruct instrumental rationality, vividly illustrating the inherent connection between responsibility and happiness, thereby achieving an aesthetic revision of Enlightenment value systems through narrative tension. Emma constructs a dialogic field with its high-frequency use of “happiness” lexemes and employs dual irony to dismantle the instrumental rationality-dominated notion of “earthly happiness.” The novel can be interpreted as a “reversed Cinderella story,” in which the ironic tone culminates in the moral imperative: humility is essential to attaining true happiness. In Austen’s era, the criteria for judging happiness lost their self-evident authority, and Emma reflects precisely this crisis of judgment.