“What It Takes to Want to Turn to Others” by Dr Nirvana Tanoukhi

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We are very happy to share that Dr Nirvana Tanoukhi (Dartmouth College) will be joining us for one of the BA and MA sessions of Modern War Poetry and Theatre and Writing Research. In this lecture, Tanoukhi will talk about her forthcoming book, Disagreeing Together, which examines the crisis of public discourse in Anglo-European democracies through the lens of aesthetic disagreement and the literary origins of the public sphere.

Nirvana Tanoukhi asks why citizens of Anglo-European democracies are increasingly uninterested in talking with those who disagree with them and in contending with facts that challenge their held opinions. In What It Takes to Turn to Others, Tanoukhi argues that the current answer to these questions fundamentally misrepresents the retreat from dialogue and disregard for facts as developments. The current dysfunction of our public discourse can be better understood and more effectively addressed by returning to the kinds of conversations that cultural historians and political theorists widely credit with originating the public sphere: disagreements about literature and art. Tanoukhi clarifies why the literary origins of publicity have been sidelined in recent debates about democratic crisis, and shows how aesthetic disagreements can attune interlocutors to the value of forming and sharing opinions in ways that ostensibly higher-stakes exchanges often cannot.

To connect these claims to a student-facing activity, Tanoukhi will briefly introduce the conceptual framework she develops in her book project on dialogue and art, and then work with students on a short chapter from Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation, in which Rankine recounts a theatre visit with a close white female friend and the conflict that follows. The discussion format is adaptable to both undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts.

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Nirvana Tanoukhi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. Her research and teaching explore questions of scale, form, and critical thinking in twentieth- and twenty-first-century world literature, with particular interests in the novel, aesthetics, and the pragmatics of literary communication in global contexts.