Tanoukhi's lecture examines an ongoing public debate about the use of "relatable" in the literature classroom and social media, in order to map out an aesthetic mindset which, she suggests, can explain central impasses in politics and pedagogy today. Tanoukhi argues that the debate among cultural commentators and literary critics about the merits of “relatability” as a criterion for judging literary works and characters, in fact, stages a significant confrontation between new and old conceptions of the function of art. Beginning with an analysis of the relatability debate, the talk proposes to do two things: 1) to help clarify, and invite reflection about, the status of our commitment to the principle of critical thinking which is fundamental to democratic theory and practice, and 2) to explain how the aesthetic politics reflected by the relatability debate informs the way that interpretive knowledge is valued by the public and in the academy today. To do this, the talk also analyzes the role played by judgments of “relatability” in the US Presidential Elections of 2016, and returns to Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment in the third critique.

Nirvana Tanoukhi is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Sponsored by the Global Postcolonialisms Collective and the Transnational Contemporary Literature Workshop. Contact Katie Hummel at hummel@umich.edu for more information.