The OSU Humanities Institute is excited to announce the visiting speaker for the 2024 Zacher Lecture in the Humanities: Merve Emre.
Abstract and more details coming soon.
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 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), 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 (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US / Harper Collins UK).
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. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has judged the International Booker Prize, the Story Prize, the Whiting Foundation Grant, and other major prizes and awards. She currently serves on the boards of Words Without Borders, the Hawthornden Foundation, and Connecticut Humanities.
The Humanities Institute and its related centers host a wide range of events, from intense discussions of works in progress to cutting-edge presentations from world-known scholars, artists, activists and everything in between.
We value in-person engagement at our events as we strive to amplify the energy in the room. To submit an accommodation request, please send your request to MacKenzie DiMarco: dimarco.33@osu.edu.
