The Humanities Institute invites EHE Faculty, Staff, and Students to the 2024 Zacher Lecture with literary scholar and writer Merve Emre, on Thursday, November 21.
Event Description
The Ohio State Humanities Institute is excited to announce the visiting speaker for the 2024 Zacher Lecture in the Humanities: Merve Emre, presenting “Too Close Reading: Asceticism and Pleasure” on Thursday, November 21 from 4 to 5 pm in the Faculty Club. This event is free and open to all.
This talk argues that miniaturism, as represented by contemporary forms like “flash fiction” or “the short-short story,” emerges as the primary aesthetic strategy for foregrounding the disciplined study of grammar over figuration. In the fiction of Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Garielle Lutz, grammar is inseparable from gender, and gender is inseparable from forms of literary labor that are regularly trivialized, devalued, and rendered invisible: translating, editing, fact checking, transcribing, type-setting, and teaching composition. Through its promotion of too close reading, or reading at the smallest scale possible, miniaturism reveals the unappreciated relationship between literary asceticism and literary pleasure.
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway. She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits.
She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to New Literary History, PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity.
