| dc.description.abstract | Through a blend of critical analysis and personal narrative, this essay explores frameworks of meaning-making and their place in a student’s life using The Idiot by Elif Batuman as a touchstone text. In this work, my own ideas of meaning and truth are in conversation with Selin’s using a dialectical model combining the traditional academic essay and a letter to the novel’s protagonist to explore thematic resonances between Batuman’s novel and my own experience in academia. It considers and compares academic and personal modes of meaning-making in the campus setting and outside of it, addressing their strengths and failures, as well as tentatively proposing the potential benefits of leaning toward a more creative, literary meaning-making framework. I critique the academic method represented in The Idiot for its overreliance on definitive truth and dissonance with the felt knowledge found in one’s own experience. I critique the affective method represented in The Idiot for its instability, abstraction, and vulnerability to interpersonal and systemic influence. I suggest that a literary framework of meaning-making may maintain the critical approach of academia integrated with the experiential, emotional mode of the personal framework, creating a new framework which is strong but sensitive, stable but open. The analysis here is heavily influenced by Rita Felski’s Postcritique and references several other interdisciplinary theorists and fiction writers. This is an essay about the intersections of knowing, feeling, and meaning. | en_US |
