Dr Orlaith Darling
- School: School of Education
- Mentor: Dr Áine Mahon
Ignorance and bliss: Higher education and mental ill health in contemporary literary culture
When the promises of another era – upward mobility and security in return for work, merit, and educational attainment – fail to materialise, how do we mentally endure? My current project examines the raft of recent fiction animated by the sense that the historical present is characterised by a broken link between doing everything “right” and reaping societal rewards. It homes in on the relationship between Higher Education and mental health, arguing that this relationship is in many ways both rooted in and generative of the contemporary moment. In previous eras of capitalist development, Higher Education had three socially pertinent effects. Firstly, it was a pathway to upward mobility for graduates. Secondly, it conferred a “stake” in normative society such that graduates “bought into” the dominant economic systems from which they stood to benefit. Thirdly, the university was an incubator for mass social and political movements. I argue that these features have undergone drastic change in the neoliberal era. Millennials are the first generation who will be poorer than their parents, even if they are better educated. They are at once less likely to benefit from the dominant capitalist order, and so do not have a stake in it, but are also more indebted to it – having literally accrued huge debts for college degrees. They are politically aware and articulate, but often struggle to find outlets for their dissatisfaction. Knowledge is no longer power, but rather begets a deeper awareness of the structural underpinnings of one’s lack of power. In this context, I ask what remains of the myth of upward social mobility in the contemporary Anglophone novel, and how we endure through an era of capitalist development that foreclosing on its own promises.
Contact details:
Email: darling@ucd.ie
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