Relating to Elena: Unexpressed and Unrecognized Feeling

Abstract

This thesis considers what it means to use the academically maligned concept of “relatability” as a critical reading tool. Drawing on Rita Felski’s Hooked, Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, I articulate the facets I think compose relatability: relating requires a more than intellectual relationship to text; it includes recognition; it includes distance or unfamiliarity (the imperfectness of the recognition is essential); it necessitates reading vulnerably, because to relate is to be vulnerable; and finally, relating to a text has the potential to produce transformation: the experience of being moved and thus changed. I will then look at my experience of relating to Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, simultaneously reading how relatability works for characters within the text. I reflect on how these facets of relatability I define influence my own reading and my relationship to feeling as an interpretive method.