Collaborative Criticism with Merve Emre

Merve Emre is a writer, literary critic, and the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. Frequently appearing on the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Merve Emre’s critical writings span a myriad of subject matters in canonical literature (tackling the much-revered titles from household and marquee authors like James Joyce and Simone de Beauvoir), intellectual history, feminism, media and political theory, and the perpetual tides in popular culture such as the MBTI personality test (her musings on which were rendered into an award-winning book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing). Most recently, also leading the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at the University, she has become known as one of the most important advocates and trailblazers for a new form of pedagogy in professing English and the art of writing in higher education, with an emphasis on public readership and the circulation of prose beyond academic institutions. Her podcast series, The Critic and Her Publics, as “collaborative criticism” in dialogue form, conducted from her talks and interviews with writers, editors, and publishers including Meghan O’Rourke, Emily Greenhouse, Radhika Jones, Andrea Long Chu, Maggie Doherty, and more, inspired not only her own students who were able to attend these lively events in Middletown, but also many younger students and aspiring critics who played and replayed the series on their sticker-ed headphones outside of the bounds of that campus. 

How does she find the compelling unity in the multiplicity of roles she plays as a professor, a critic, an administrator, and a podcaster? What historical figures and works of literature does she find the anchors and bases for what she is doing now? How would this new model of English pedagogy that draws more on engagement with a broader public challenge the more conventional paradigm of knowledge production and examination as “a closed loop between” the scholar and another scholar / the teacher and her student? With these queries in mind, I called Merve Emre on one rather ordinary, if not slightly colder than usual morning in early October amidst her meetings and work handling the numerous upcoming programs at the Writing Center. She was ready and enthusiastic as ever, and laid out to me an exciting vision of institutional imagination toward a future of literary education that could perhaps be more open, more collegial—and more pleasurable. 

HENGZHI HUANG YANG: Instead of asking the question you do at the beginning of every episode of your podcast, The Critic and Her Publics—the question about how a certain successful critic or writer get from where they were in their undergraduate years to where they are now—let me open this interview by asking, can you describe the place you are in right now, both physically and mentally? 

MERVE EMRE: I am in my office in the Shapiro Center right now. The reason I was a bit late to our call was because I was scheming with my staff about a magazine consortium that we want to organize for the spring of 2026. We would bring editors from newer magazines, just like yours, to Wesleyan for two days of master classes, panels, and writers’ rooms with our students. 

I begin by telling you this because I believe it encapsulates where I am both physically and mentally. I am constantly thinking about how to bridge the reading and writing practices and pedagogy of a liberal arts institution with the wider world of prose. Physically, the Shapiro Center is where I do a lot of that thinking. I have tried to make the Center representative of the broader relationships I’d like to forge among education, entertainment, the circulation of ideas, and the marketplace for writing.

HHY: You mentioned the idea of the Shapiro Center as a place that brings a wider range of prose to a more conventional, academia-style criticism. What is the difference between these two styles of writing—one conventionally taught at universities and in a centralized manner, the other more generally speaking as literary criticism or magazine criticism? 

ME: Conventionally, when you write an essay for an undergraduate class, there is only one reader for that essay, and that is your professor. Your professor stipulates what topics you may write about, and which objects on the syllabus you may address. You hand in an essay, your professor reads it, your professor makes some comments, and gives you a grade. 99% of the time, that's where the life of the essay ends. This pathway of production, consumption, and circulation for that essay is more or less a closed loop between two people. Its function is for the student to demonstrate knowledge to the professor, and in exchange for demonstrating that knowledge, the student receives a grade. The grade allows the student to receive a credit, which, in turn, allows the student to receive a diploma. By design, the purpose of writing that essay—the purpose of activating that closed loop—is for the student to accrue the cultural capital of a university education. Everything I’m saying is obvious. But I think it’s worth spelling out to make clear that the classroom’s model of reading and writing has little to do with how people read and write when they read and write beyond the university. 

Our curriculum is oriented to another model of production, consumption, and circulation. For instance, Zach [Fine]’s classes on “The Craft of Criticism” and “Art Criticism,” and my “Practical Criticism” classes, design assignments oriented to specific genres: the review-essay, the exhibition review, the “critic’s pick,” the manifesto. The production of an essay is not exclusively oriented toward the grade—I would abolish grades altogether if I could—but toward establishing a relationship between a writer and their reader that models the more collaborative, more open-ended editorial relationship. This involves endless drafting and redrafting. There is often a requirement that the pieces that students have been working on in-class must be pitched somewhere. The essay cannot remain trapped in the closed circuit between professor and student. It must radiate outward, whether to an actual or imagined audience.  

If you think about how a piece is produced and circulates outside of the closed circuit between professor and student, then you will necessarily have to ask a new set of questions about how your writing is consumed. Chief among them: How do I get people to read something they have absolutely no obligation to read? Never forget that your professor reads your essay because your professor has an obligation to read your essay. When you or I open The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker, we are under no obligation to read a single word in those publications. We must be persuaded to read. To persuade, you will need to fashion a style that differs from the style of the term paper or the interpretive essay.

HHY: Your comment on style and circulation reminds me of Irving Howe’s praise of Lionel Trilling in his writings’ appeal to the “pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle.” You are often regarded as quite stylish—The New York Review of Books once commented on it by saying that you “educate, entertain, scold, and charm.” I noticed that sort of ability to “dazzle” and “charm” to be a sort of personality trait and characteristic central to a critic’s voice or charisma. What can we say about style, and what do we hope to see in one’s style? How does one even teach style?

ME: We should elaborate on a few distinct, but related, aspects of writing that often get conflated in the idea of “style” and obscure how one might teach it. One aspect of style, which I mentioned in my previous answer, is genre. Generic conventions differ based on the kinds of publications one writes for, which determine—or, at least, constrain—an essay’s form, its register, and its mode of address. Another aspect of style is logic. An essay can model a specific method of argument and, in doing so, it can activate the rhetorical practices that attend to this method. Howe’s “dispute” and “dialectic” refer to two methods of argument, each with its own moves and vocabularies. The third aspect of style—the colloquial understanding of style—is one writer’s syntactic and grammatical idiosyncrasies. These idiosyncrasies can be virtuosic. They can “dazzle,” as Howe suggests, or imbue the prose with what you call “charisma.” But they can also be leaden, gauche, or embarrassing. There’s such a thing as having a bad sense of style. 

I am as interested in the charms of genre and logic as I am in the idiosyncratic arrangement of words. In fact, I have a frustration with the fetishization of idiosyncrasy as the most meaningful attribute of one’s writing. In Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics, our final guest was my editor, Leo Carey, who always says that writers think their writing needs to be 90% stylized, when really, it only needs 10%. One often encounters both critics and novelists who are overly invested in style at the expense of logic and genre; pieces, or books, that seem to be made up of overworked sentences or one-liners, too clever by half. I tend to like critics whose prose exhibits both grandeur and passion. Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, William Empson, and Leo Bersani all balance an Olympian intelligence with a sensual closeness between the reader and the writer. I like a winking sense of humor. I shudder at stand-up comedy. I despise cruelty and contempt. 

HHY: What is this ideal relationship, or public, between the critic and the reader? How might we approach this so-called “closeness” today? It seems to me that the role of the critic has changed to be not only one of exegesis or evaluation which were the tasks of classic critics, but is also one of sort of directing readers to works that might interest them, because we live in a world of so much kind of oversaturated content, opinion and information.

Personally too, you are known for doing criticism on both the micro and the macroscopic, on both pop culture and traditional literature: Woolf. Benjamin. The Campus Novel. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. The Age Gap Romance trope. Major contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk and Catherine Lacey, as well as more obscure figures like Garielle Lutz. In other words, how do you choose what to look at so closely and believe in your readers to be interested in what you choose?

ME: I rarely choose what to pay attention to in my writing by following my private desires. I have been fortunate enough to work with a range of editors who understand how I might direct the attention of readers. Often, I am asked to take a canonical text, like Paradise Lost or Ulysses, and dust off the patina of canonicity, letting the text shine for a reader who might hesitate to approach it for a variety of reasons. Or, I am asked to introduce readers to a novel that has been reissued or a text in translation. In both of these cases, I need to do the work of elaborating a historical or national context that the reader does not necessarily know. This is, essentially, a pedagogic role. 

But paying attention can take forms other than writing. A friend likes to joke that, while some other people are addicted to alcohol, and others to drugs, I'm addicted to judging literary prizes. A prize lets you absorb an entire literary field, at a particular moment in time, and then advocate for what people should attend to within that field. That advocacy can be undertaken with supreme confidence. When I judged the International Booker Prize, the jury read 132 books in translation within the course of six months, which let us understand the field of literature translated into English in a schematic way, which, in turn, let us advocate for the superiority of the novels on our shortlist. Similarly, chairing the Pulitzer jury for fiction, and judging both the First Novel Prize and the Story Prize, allowed me to map the field of American fiction in the mid 2020s with a thoroughness that would not have been possible if I had only read the bestsellers list, or The New Yorker’s best books of the year, or asked my friends for recommendations. 

HHY: That’s so interesting hearing about learning from the prizes that you judge and sharing what you’ve learned—although, to probe a little deeper here, the notion of judging really interests me. What are some key differences between being a judge to a text and being an advocate, an attendant to a text? You wrote this piece [“The Critic as Friend”] in The Yale Review last year grappling with the difference between the critic as a judge and the critic as a friend; could that be a useful distinction?

ME: In the essay, I wanted to place these two historical types side by side and show how the two merge into one infinitely evolving character. The idea of the critic as a judge derives from the Aristotelian idea of criticism, in which what critics used to do was to assess works by figuring out how closely they cleaved to the unities of time, space, and event. This was the primary function of criticism: to determine whether a work, based on its generic identification, met the criteria for that genre. The works were dramas and epics, genres with clear formal conventions. 

The introduction of the novel complicated the function of criticism. The novel is a wildly flexible and absorptive genre, which means there aren’t any pre-existing standards of how we judge it. If you don't know what the criteria are for judging a novel, then how can you persuade others of your judgments? The rise of the novel spurred the development of a different set of critical techniques from Aristotelian genre criticism. These techniques range from passionate paraphrase to in-line quotation, the creation of narratological schema, moral evaluations of character, and so on. These techniques offered a way of reading and writing that could get the critic much closer to a novel’s compositional arrangement. It allowed the critic to ascertain more precisely the relationship between a novel’s parts and its whole, between its aesthetic strategies and its ethico-political commitments. This practice of criticism also offers a blueprint for my understanding of friendship—friendship as a practice of attending to the architecture of a whole life, a whole text, and representing it faithfully to the world.

That is also how I think of my friendships. I understand the way that my friends work so well that I could represent their innermost lives in a way that does no injustice to them. I can judge people on the terms that they set out for me. You must always hold someone to standards they are capable of meeting. They don't always live up to those standards. Our friends are not perfect. But we are capable of judging them at their absolute best, as opposed to comparing them to others.

HHY: You have to “befriend” an author’s work before judging them in the ways they deserve to be treated the most. And that friendship also becomes an ideal model for circulation and pedagogy with your readers.

ME: You must understand and articulate the horizon against which you're judging them. You would never take your friend to task for not doing something you know it is constitutionally impossible for her to do. Similarly, you don't judge a novel for what that novel isn't doing and isn’t capable of doing. You don't judge a work of domestic realism, for instance, for being insufficiently experimental.

To get back to prizes: in a practical sense, friendship indexes vertical judgment as opposed to horizontal judgment. Horizontal judgment is when you read 132 books and select “the best” one. Vertical judgment is when you read someone’s entire oeuvre, assess what the author has the ability to do, and delineate when they live up to these abilities and when they don’t. 

HHY: In that sense, with the various obligations, responsibilities, and investments that come with friendship. How can we ensure that the community of friendship in criticism is one that is open and welcoming, instead of one consisting of the coteries of close friends? As we go on to talk and care deeply about circulation, it seems like there is a common conception that the critic as a friend, even taking the form of essays enabled by commercially printed literary magazines, is still merely read by the same crowds of graduate students and professors. 

ME:  Part of the relationship that we are trying to calibrate between circulation and style is entangled with questions of medium. Different mediums allow us to circulate criticism among different publics who become addressed through different styles. It would be wrong to assume that criticism can only circulate in print publications or even in textual form. A great deal of what I do as a teacher or an interviewer is to perform criticism through speech. When I speak in my classroom, I am performing criticism, often in concert with my students. Similarly, I often think of an author event as an opportunity to co-produce criticism. 

Another piece that also appeared in The Yale Review is an interview with Rachel Cusk, which is based on an event that she and I did together at the Southbank Centre in London. To me, that exchange is a very satisfying piece of criticism, about Cusk’s commitment to a Lawrentian strain of modernism, her engagement with the mythological and the archetypal, and how writing can reconfigure the relationship between the soul and the body, especially the aging woman’s body. Speech may not be as clean or precise as writing, but it has other virtues. It encourages surprise and spontaneity. It can train you to craft your thoughts—to think in sentences and paragraphs—as you experience them in the company of others.  

Speech can create new occasions for criticism: recording a podcast, hosting an event, addressing an informal book group, or teaching in community centers or prisons. This makes it possible for criticism to reach publics beyond the readers of literary magazines, who, as you say, are more or less interchangeable with your average graduate student at an elite institution.

HHY: It is refreshing to consider criticism in speech. It reveals many things that otherwise go unnoticed. Can you say a little bit more about podcasts versus essays in terms of style? What is the difference between speaking and writing, or listening and reading, in effect?

ME: One obvious difference is that the criticism in speech, such as a podcast, can be explicitly dialogic. This doesn’t mean that the essay is not dialogic, but that when criticism is done in this more open form, its dialogic quality is laid bare. I would again reference the episode with Leo, who says that, through dialogue, the writer and the editor create “a third thing” that belongs to both of them and to neither of them. 

This dialogism is concealed in the form of the essay, and there are all kinds of para-textual practices that contribute to its concealment. The most obvious is the concept of the “author function”, brilliantly theorized by Michel Foucault. When I publish a piece, my byline is on it. Legally, I own the copyright to it. This makes it seem as if I am the sole author of that piece, which is not, strictly speaking, true. Authorship is always multiple and complex, especially authorship within an organization, like a newspaper or magazine. But even if you don't have an intricate editorial apparatus behind you—even if you are, say, writing and publishing on Substack—there exists a medium and a platform that structures your writing. There exist received genres, like the listicle, the diary entry, or the gossip column, and ambient sociolects, like “internet speak.” The individuality of the writer is, in many ways, a modern fiction. We are all dialogic creatures. 

HHY: Criticism is always dialogic as it is always communicative. The formal difference between writing and speech is whether it is more hidden or revealed.

ME: You featured a “Summer Reading List” from one of my favorite critics, Sianne Ngai. What I admire about Sianne's Theory of the Gimmick and Our Aesthetic Categories is how she refashions the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant, via the writings of Karl Marx and Stanley Cavell, to argue that aesthetic judgment has two aspects to it. There is the subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure that arises in our encounter with an artwork. There is also the compulsion to communicate that pleasure or displeasure to others. The desire to share one’s judgments – to transmute them into a common good—is innate to the experience of aesthetic pleasure. 

We want to perform criticism because literature brings us pleasure, and we want to share that pleasure. The pleasure that literature offers is not necessarily better or more meaningful than other kinds of pleasures. I do not think novels or poems generate superior experiences of pleasure compared to, say, having a fine meal or having great sex. But the pleasure that literature offers is utterly distinct. It would be a shame for this variety of pleasure to disappear. We should want to preserve the life span of pleasure by sharing it with as many people as possible.  

HHY: This centerpiece of aesthetic pleasure really completes the dance of circulation, style, and medium we were setting up earlier. What have been some of the moments of aesthetic pleasure in communication and building a public, particularly for you? You often talk about being a mother and a professor in your writings. I am sure these roles play some parts. 

ME: Kant’s theory of judgment is deeply invested in the idea of free play. When I’m with my kids, I think about how reading aloud, talking about what we’re reading, judging what we’re reading, writing, drawing, or doodling can be conceived of as a form of free play. In play, perception and cogitation come together to yield a revelation in the subject, or the child, of capacities that they didn't even know they had before. Discovering these capacities together can feel pleasurable rather than coercive, persuasive rather than authoritarian. You get that happy, buzzy, liberated feeling. You experience a shared high. I suppose this is my philosophy of parenting, but it’s also my philosophy of teaching. I operate more or less the same at home and in the classroom. 

HHY: Philosophies about education always intrigue me. This idea of play, joy, and encouragement in education makes me think of the works of Goethe. I guess my last question would also be about him. I noticed that there were about four or five titles all about Goethe in your “Summer Reading List” with us. Were you working on a project on Goethe? What were some of the characteristics of Goethe that interested you?

ME: I first wrote about Goethe’s Elective Affinities in an essay called “Love as Aesthetic Education.” That essay is part of the book that I'm writing, Love and Other Useless Pursuits, which assembles an erotic canon—a canon that merges eros and education to insist that love is a pedagogical process. Love heightens our perception and our cognition in ways that teach you how to appreciate art. 

I just finished an essay for The New Yorker on several recent Goethe biographies. The eminent German scholar Nicholas Boyle has written an outstanding multi-volume biography of Goethe; the third volume hasn't come out, so I read the first two volumes. György Lukács’s book on Goethe examines his relationship to Enlightenment ideology and the bourgeois subject. Walter Benjamin’s “On Goethe” was recommended by a friend who had read my Raritan essay and knew about my unshakeable attachment to Benjamin’s “Die Wahlverwandtschaften” essay, the origin of immanent critique. 

HHY: I mention Goethe because, in a way, this interview has been incredibly Goethean, in its many curiosities in his eternal themes: education, aesthetics, pleasure, and criticism…

ME: And administration! He did so much administration for Weimar, to the point that he couldn't finish a more ambitious piece of writing for a decade. He was managing the silver mines and staffing the university at Jena and allegedly teaching Karl August how to sleep with women in the woods. Goethe was a truly world-historical poet, and I’m drawn to the Goethean career in all its compromised glory. His imagination of what it meant to live in the modern world as both a forceful and a frustrated aesthetic subject is very powerful to me.