ASECS Day 2. Teaching Austen and Intersectionality. New musings on the “relatable”.

I didn’t get a Day 1 of this conference and I envy those who did. The first panel I got to was at 8.00am on Friday 1 April 2022. 8.00am conference panels are not an April Fools joke. They are actually normal within an North American environment.

Indeed, chatting beforehand it occurred to some of us that some of the most popular panels seemed to have been deliberately placed at 8.00am, just to get people out of bed.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about conference blogging, and I’ve decided to perhaps slow down and showcase individual panels rather than sum up whole days of proceedings at once. I should let my happy retrieved memories last.

Kate Ozment: “Teaching Austen with Bridgerton

Misty Krueger: “Why we should teach Woman of Colour alongside Sanditon.

Sophia Huggins: “Intersectional Reimagining of Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century Classroom.

The great thing about this panel was the experience it offered of teaching real students and respectfully considering honest student reactions. This is not the same as “pandering” to short attention spans or reinforcing contemporary orthodoxies. It’s about finding points of contact – and discovering areas of access.

It is striking how many arguments about privilege, exploitation, diversity, and representation Jane Austen is organising right now.

There was even an attempt to reclaim and recover the word “relatable” – or at least a call to stop “eye-rolling” every time the word is used. I find this a little difficult, but I was forced to work out for myself a fresh articulation of my animus which consists of the word being used oppositionally. I think it’s “unrelatable” or NOT relatable that I really dislike – and I dislike the word being used positively because the positive usage logically legitimates the negative. I have no problem with emotional identification or encouraging students to “relate” to a literary event, character, or experience. It is only when the term is used to prematurely curtail such identifications on the basis of what I would regard as fairly flimsy circumstantial evidence that I start to have a problem.

The dominance of “affect theory” – or rather the dominance of the invocation of “affect theory”, leads us to want to vindicate the emotional, perhaps physical and visceral, as part of the reading experience. The only issue concerns the immediacy of this emotional “relatable” response – the basis on which it is provoked or denied – and the extent to which it can be evidentially justified and evangelically disseminated.

I’m not going to start using the word “relatable”. I’m not going to stop telling students to use a word search to find the word “relatable” in their pre-submitted essays so that they can erase it in time. But I may have to do something about my eye-rolling.