“I teach undergraduates, and I am increasingly struck by the extent to which the pedagogical norms that I learned and internalized - whether explicitly or implicitly - were based on frustrating the student,” Batuman said. The pair also discussed Batuman’s current role as an adjunct associate professor in the English department at Barnard College and her pedagogical approach.
“Compliance, especially for girls and for people who come from another culture, and the burden to succeed is part of what makes your life feel high stakes.”
“Now there’s so much incredible writing by immigrants and by the children of immigrants, but when I was growing up, there wasn’t that much that I was aware of,” Batuman said. Like Batuman, the novels’ protagonist Selin Karadağ is the daughter of Turkish immigrants and an aspiring writer. When asked about the rarity of “protagonists who are fundamentally good students,” Batuman said she often wondered why she was a “compliant subject” as an undergraduate.
“I’ve been really happy about the auto-fiction trend, even though I agree it’s sort of an annoying word.” “We experience everything from our own point of view, so to me, it makes a lot of sense to write from that perspective,” Batuman said. Hundreds gathered in Emerson Hall Thursday to hear American author Elif Batuman ’99 and Harvard English professor Beth Blum in a conversation hosted by Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.ĭuring the event, which marked the first in-person session of the series “Writers Speak,” the pair spoke about Batuman’s outlook on writing and her Pulitzer Prize-finalist novel “The Idiot,” which she based on her experience as a freshman at Harvard.īatuman kicked off the conversation by reading an excerpt from the first chapter of her latest novel “Either/Or,” a sequel to “The Idiot” published in May, before discussing her writing process with Blum.Īs a young author, Batuman said creative writing meant “inventing characters” and “imaginatively projecting outside of yourself” - an idea she found counterintuitive.
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