The ‘Relatable’ Fallacy

By Kit Nicholls. I think I first heard a student declare a book “not relatable” about five years ago. I got the gist, but the word struck me as strange, clumsy. Before long, though, it had become a regular part of student vernacular, and I started to see it even in the The New York Times. Students use this word to express their sense that a text can be related to, that it is accessible to them. Unsurprisingly, contemporary pop culture is by and large relatable. Daniel Defoe? Not relatable. More...