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This essay offers a defense of the concept of “relatability,” an impulse in students we’ve long derided as unproductive and even ethically suspect. In particular, it aims to sketch out a series of attempts to use contemporary texts to disrupt students’ assumptions about their emotional and psychological distance from Romantic-era fiction. Rather than dismissing talk of readerly identification, I show how I have attempted to leverage my students’ desire to relate in order to launch a discussion of historical reading practices and the emergence of relatability as a value.
Any discussion of teaching the Romantic with the contemporary will necessarily
invite questions about the relative value accorded to each of the literary
historical periods being brought into relation. Are we introducing contemporary
texts (or debates or images) into our classrooms in order to “sell” Romanticism
(to make it appear more relevant; more interesting; more, in our
common-but-unfortunate parlance, “sexy”)? And is this type of appeal, arising
out of a well-intentioned attempt to maintain a space for Romanticism in our
curricula, misguided? (That is, are we merely reinforcing the secondary status
we’re attempting to correct for?) Will comparisons between contemporary and
Romantic texts always remain superficial? Does a presentist approach to pedagogy
depreciate the texts under study by undermining their historical specificity?
Might we, on the other hand, be giving the false impression that contemporary
phenomena are simply a given and
I’ve been tempted to call my contribution to this special issue a defense of
“relatability”: a persistent pedagogical bugbear that has of late been
challenged, to widespread acclaim, in the popular press as well (see Mead and
Onion). The idea that literature should be “relatable,” critics argue, is
symptomatic of an epidemic of narcissism, evidence of a prevailing cultural
aversion to difference. The ubiquity of the selfie (casual but posed
self-portraiture, usually shared on social media) is often taken to be
emblematic of this millennial penchant for naval-gazing. While I remain
ambivalent about the term “relatability,” I have to admit that it’s true: I
However, I think this impulse to connect (or to seek connection where it is found lacking) also holds the potential to open up fruitful conversations in the classroom about how we read now (and how they used to read back then). In particular, I aim here to sketch out a series of attempts to use contemporary texts to disrupt students’ assumptions about their emotional and psychological distance from Romantic-era fiction. Rather than dismissing talk of readerly identification, I have attempted to leverage my students’ desire to relate in order to launch a discussion of historical reading practices and the emergence of relatability as a value. To put it another way, I use my classroom as a site for uncovering the prehistory of relatability. These conversations require both careful historicizing and, at the same time, a willingness to remain limber enough to move between kinds of texts, between kinds of attention, and between points in time.
My current thoughts on these questions were prompted by an obstacle I encountered while teaching a unit on sentimental reading in my Gothic novel course. My aim in this series of class meetings was to help students connect the sentimental novel to the Gothic as they completed Ann Radcliffe’s
if a rainy morning deprived [Catherine and Isabella] of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt the ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. (23)I won’t rehash here the contours of a discussion I’m sure many of my readers have led in their own classrooms, but I will say that the discussion of
While this particular course had gone well up to this point, in this unit I found it difficult to help my students consider the socio-historical specificity of the culture of sensibility without dismissing out of hand the reading practices we were discussing, most of which they found simply bizarre. My students, in a rare united voice, expressed a knowing disdain for the reading practices of the readers and protagonists of Gothic fiction. The complaint concentrated around a claim about unbridgeable historical distance: people just aren’t like that these days (and so, it followed, my students couldn’t be expected to understand these aberrant historical creatures). It seems to me that the choice before me in this kind of moment is between, on the one hand, taking advantage of that historical distance and, on the other, mitigating it. In this particular instance, when what I wanted my students to understand was precisely the collective experience of immersive reading, I chose the latter.
Trying to find an analog for these intense—and shared—emotional experiences of literary texts, I came to our next class armed with examples from our contemporary culture: YouTube reaction videos.
In case you’re not familiar: these curious short films document a particular viewer’s experience of a text (in some cases, a
Invariably, the creators of these reaction videos fill their (and our) screens, their legible facial expressions clearly the main event. In most cases, the viewer does not actually see what the subject is seeing (though in rare cases an inset image displays the clip that is being responded to). Often, however, the videos assume prior knowledge of the clip being viewed by the subject. In other words, the reaction of the subject is more entertaining if the viewer can, on her own, anticipate and then call up the particular images that are eliciting a corresponding response from the subject. In this way, the videos experiment with a kind of asynchronous shared viewing experience, even as the subject draws particular attention and the viewer sharing this experience remains unknown (save for any supplementary interaction in the comments). This shared viewing is complicated further by the fact that the clips to which subjects react are often adaptations; this means that levels of familiarity with the shared text are layered. When watching the reaction to a movie trailer, for example, a viewer may be looking for both the response to the trailer which she has already seen and, at the same time, the response to a depiction that deviates in some way from a representation in the book both she and the subject have previously read.
These videos, like the novels we discussed in class, triangulate the experience of readerly interaction in a fascinating—if somewhat unsettling—way. Our viewings led to a lively discussion about the physical performance of affect, about both Romantic and contemporary fandoms (subcultures organized around shared fascinations with a particular cultural phenomenon), and about why certain characters might be more likely to provoke an intense response of identification or revulsion (for more on Romantic fandom, see Eisner; on fandom more broadly, see Jamison). This discussion also led to a serious consideration of how gender expectations figure into our understanding of companionate reading and performed emotion. My students, most of them women, traced some of their own initial distaste to concerns about the performance of affect as the performance of a certain kind of femininity (and, in particular, to a sense that to cry publicly would mean exposing vulnerability). These concerns seemed to be troubled, if not resolved, by the realization that the work of orchestrating and then broadcasting public crying imbricates vulnerability with authority.
At my students’ prompting, we looked at other subgenres of reaction videos, including those that documented responses to sports losses or victories (a subject bursts into tears after a winning World Cup goal, the camera squarely focused on his face to capture a live, real-time reaction) and the wildly popular reaction videos showing viewers of the HBO series
I want to stress that the obstacle I encountered in teaching my students about
the culture of sentiment was not that students too eagerly invested themselves
in these characters and their lives. Rather (and, I think, typically), they
were, at first, quite sure that these texts were alien to them, to the point of
presumed unknowability. To help them explore their own reactions, I didn’t just
present them with evidence that these characters
Building on our conversation about reaction videos, I also showed students this
caricature of two young women reading together in a vis-à-vis carriage. In doing
so, I quite pointedly wrested the image from its historical context. (The
caricature is poking fun at fashionability more than it is demonstrating
companionate reading.) One serendipitous visual effect is that the young ladies’
letters look (at least to me and to my students) startlingly like our modern
electronic devices; like passengers on the Subway, they aren’t, as the name of
their conveyance would otherwise suggest, “face-to-face” but staring down,
intent on their reading. The time warp of the image is immediately suggestive;
the figures in the image seem both of their time and alarmingly familiar. That
hunch, that stare are a part of our own muscle memory. This familiarizing effect
allows the image to raise questions about our own habits of media consumption:
Can immersion coexist with shared intimacy? When we stare at screens, do we
necessarily shut out those around us? And what of the intimacy we share with
those we encounter on the screen (or on the page)? A similar effect is produced
by the work of digital artist Kim Dong-Kyu, whose “When You See an Amazing
Sight”—featured at the beginning of this essay—wrenches perhaps the most clichéd
image of the Romantic sublime into a commentary on our modern tendency to
document rather than experience. The commentary, like the discussions I try to
have in my classes, raises questions about just how different our contemporary
phenomenology might be: was the Romantic sublime ever
While I would contend that these kinds of metacritical discussions could be
valuable in a variety of classes, courses in Romantic fiction are uniquely
situated to explore the complexity of students’ responses to fictional
character. This is because, as Deidre Shauna Lynch has shown, “It is
romantic-period characters who first succeed in prompting their readers to
conceive of them as beings who take on lives of their own and who thereby escape
their social as well as their textual contexts” (8). Lynch makes clear that
Romantic fiction mobilized a complex response to literary character that can’t
simply be summed up with the term “identification” or “relatability”:
Lynch is certainly right to encourage us to develop more
specificity when exploring the historical dimensions of character in our
scholarship. At the same time, it’s clear that “identification” and
“relatability”
We take a risk when we assume that students are just trying to relate to everything and are eliding differences along the way. So much of what I expose my students to is unknown to them. Why rob them of what isn’t? Relatability, as I see it, isn’t a way for them to dig out; it’s a way for them to get in. We can all relate (sorry!) to Michael Warner’s characterization of his classroom: “Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they aren’t supposed to. They identify with characters” (13). But Warner’s argument is that we can only figure out what we mean by “critical reading” if we allow ourselves to consider it as always bound up in relation to its uncritical other. I share with critics of relatability a frustration with inert critical responses—the sort that shut down or close off analysis rather than encouraging it. But I’m less convinced that “relatable” is more disposed to this kind of danger than any other initial response to literary fiction. In fact, in my experience, relatable (and, crucially, the kinds of probing questions that it necessarily prompts) holds particular potential to compel students to trace their responses back to their textual causes, to think through the intricacy of their connections to Romantic texts. To scrub the term from our classrooms is to foreclose serious discussions of the complex work that goes into (and has long gone into) novel reading.