At a time when anyone can post their evaluations of books, music, and films on digital media, where does that leave the professional critic? How should up-and-coming critics position themselves to prompt public dialogue on modern cultural production?
These questions were at the heart of “The Function of Criticism,” a talk by Merve Emre, a widely published nonfiction author, book editor, critic, and professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University. Her most recent books include The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Liveright, 2021); an experimental, epistolary work of literary criticism titled The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020); and What’s Your Type? The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (William Collins, 2018). The event, which unfolded for a lively, standing-room-only audience at Swift Hall this past January, was one of a series of lectures cosponsored by the Program for Public Thinking, a partnership between UChicago’s Parrhesia Program for Public Thought and Discourse and The Point magazine.
Jon Baskin, AM’12, PhD’16, a founding editor of The Point, introduced Emre as someone who could fulfill the mission of the series—“bringing theorists of public thinking together with practitioners”—through her own trajectory as both a cultural critic and a writer who has written about what it means to be a critic today. Emre also uses her background to inform her teaching of emerging writers. Describing some of her recent writing for The New Yorker, she characterized her task there as “toggling” between the academic world and the magazine’s readership while reviewing books she loves. Her writing about criticism and her teaching are ways to figure out “how to make that toggling programmatic.”
Early in her talk, Emre made what for her is a key distinction—between teaching the craft of writing criticism and the “craft of thought” that should underpin quality critical work. Unpacking a crisis of legitimacy she sees facing modern-day critics, Emre yoked the “democratization” of criticism via digital media together with “the deskilling of writing,” a problem she defined not as critics’ failure to write with flair but as the failure of some critics to engage deeply enough with their material to offer substance as well.
To confront the crisis of legitimacy she had identified, Emre turned to history and to a group of women writers—Margaret Cavendish, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison—who had each faced a similar predicament for a different reason: never being able to rest secure in their own authority due to gender discrimination, as well as racial bias in Morrison’s case. Drawing on their theories of wit, discrimination, judgment, and advocacy, Emre identified the four authors collectively as inspiration for a framework that could underpin the function and feasibility of criticism today.
The audience was animated and restive, but Emre was both gracious and game for a bit of verbal sparring. One young woman perched on a table at the perimeter of the cavernous room loudly interjected comments until Emre paused and said to her, “You seem to want to speak.” The woman did not have a ready reply. During the Q&A period, a questioner referred to Cavendish as “what’s-her-name,” prompting Emre’s polite but firm insistence that he name the author before she engaged with his query.
Cultivating lively engagement seems to be part of what Emre aims for in her teaching as well. As part of her response to a question about how to apply her critical framework in the classroom, she encouraged her fellow professors in the room to get creative about meeting today’s students where they are. She recounted engineering cliff-hangers in a class reading of Middlemarch by serializing it, distributing the text to students in small chunks. She asked them not to search for spoilers online—and they willingly complied, taking pleasure in their feelings of suspense. Exercises like that not only help students who may struggle with their attention span, Emre claimed, but also counteract the aloneness that students relate feeling, despite or because of being online twenty-four seven.
As the event’s end time drew near, the number of hands raised in the audience increased rather than decreased, causing a moment of consternation for the roving facilitator. How to choose the final question? After a brief hesitation, she offered the microphone to one last inquisitor nearby, and then the crowd got to its feet to continue the vibrant conversation informally—embodying the close attention and vigorous participation that Emre believes criticism and its teaching require.