Hating and Relating: Trump, World Literature, and Kant’s Theory of Taste

Professor Nirvana Tanoukhi of Dartmouth College will be giving a talk next Thursday, April 19th at 1830 in G-113. Hope to see you there.

"Hating and Relating: Trump, World Literature, and Kant’s Theory of Taste"

The paper assesses the rise of "the relatable" in the literature classroom and the mainstream media, and the debate between those who have embraced or dismissed the term's legitimacy as an aesthetic category.  I suggest that the debate around the relatable stages a conflict between different conceptions of the connection between aesthetic appreciation and critical thinking.  The paper's goals are 1) to explain why Relatability irritates some but appeals to others, and 2) to determine (by returning to Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) just how incommensurate the Relatable is with the idea of aesthetic judgment in the tradition of critique, conversely, what we can learn from the Relatable about the apparent incommensurability of critique to our moment. 

Biography

Nirvana Tanoukhi is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.  She received her PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford in 2009, with a minor in History.   She was trained as a comparatist of the novel across central Europe and the postcolonial world, with a focus on British literature and African literature continentally defined (focusing on Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco). 

Tanoukhi has been a faculty and founding advisory-board member of The Institute for World Literature at Harvard since 2009.  She is a recipient of various fellowships and grants supported by the SSRC, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation, and has held two resident fellowships at Harvard, at the Humanities Center and the Hutcheon Institute for African & African American Research.  

Tanoukhi has published essays in Research in African Literatures, New Literary History, PMLA, The Routledge Companion to World Literature, the World Literature Reader, and an essay collection titled Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Duke UP, 2009) which she co-edited with Bruce Robbins and David-Palumbo-Liu. 

Her last article in the PMLA, "Surprise Me If You Can't," analyzes the figure of surprise in recent ethico-methodological arguments on behalf of the literary object and of critical objectivity.  This essay is part of a book project, entitled Reading Without Prejudice, a book that presents a defense of aesthetic judgment for democratic culture after globalization.

Tanoukhi also translated Maryam, Keeper of Stories (Seagull, 2015), an acclaimed novel set in the Lebanese Civil War.