No one does theories and theories-about-theories better than the University of Chicago, and so it was fitting that its Parrhesia Program for Public Thinking and Discourse hosted critic Merve Emre at a lecture and a lunch in the first week of February titled “The Function of Criticism” and “Becoming a Critic.”
In the respectably crowded Swift Hall lecture room, Emre’s lecture began with the usual academic procedures: introducing the speaker who would introduce her, misattributing a Yeats line to Shakespeare, quoting Arendt on the importance of thinking, and enumerating a long list of her accolades and publications. Finally, Emre took the podium. After prefacing by critiquing the “anxious answers” people have offered to “anxious questions” about criticism’s future in a world where Letterboxd, Goodreads, Substack and their avalanches of unfiltered opinions are the most widespread form of critique, she began by cracking open a La Croix and turning over a page.
Emre announced that criticism requires an “anchoring set of concepts and rationales.” These took the form of four critical virtues, each of which she paired with a structural apparatus and an exemplary figure: wit, the individual, and seventeenth-century Margaret Cavendish; discrimination, genre, and nineteenth-century George Eliot; judgment, history, and nineteenth-century Virginia Woolf; advocacy, the state, and twentieth-century Toni Morrison. Wit is the ever-flowing passions emanating from the raw charisma of the perceptive writer. Discrimination is the ability to discern whole and part and convert feeling into knowledge. Judgment is the sense of historicity and authority that allows one to elevate some works over others. Advocacy is the capacity to consider the state’s relation to art and to cultivate, within criticism, an “intellectual and spiritual home for all.”
Emre began the talk by critiquing meta-critics who hung vague frameworks on the writing of a few notable men. She then rectified this by hanging her critical framework around a few notable women. While the writers invoked are indeed geniuses, Emre’s speech omitted the vitality of their living work and fell into the same “bureaucratic” categorizing she had criticized T.S. Eliot for practicing. Despite opening with a paean to wit’s spontaneity and effusion, her rehearsed remarks, with their academic cadence, felt too slick. It sounded less like a path towards creative fulfillment or a plan for political change, more like a class syllabus lacking grading standards, full of adjectives and concepts but missing the actuality of criticism and its objects—much less the place of art itself in our lives.
The Critics Club lunch, held in a roundtable classroom the next day, was a breath of fresh air. In a Q&A with The Point magazine’s managing editor Rachel Wiseman, Emre described her path into criticism: a Bachelor’s in government from Harvard, seven months at a well-paying but meaningless consulting job, and four years in Yale’s English PhD program. While completing her PhD, she wrote her first public-facing byline in the Los Angeles Review of Books and, in the decade since, has published over 70 articles and counting. While editing for LARB, she learned the ruthless skill of excising ego from writers with “impure motivations” and gained the requisite sensibility for critical authority by reading a “shit-ton” of good and bad writing.
Interestingly, what had been a call for the critic-advocate to build a unified, responsible reading public on the podium turned, in the lunchroom, to advice on “get[ting] used to being small,” to make peace with the fact that reading is no longer the keystone of societal leisure. Of course, one ought to still help out where they can—Emre mentioned teaching at a prison near her post in Wesleyan University—but the public is no longer a public of print, if there is a “public” at all. While a grim prognosis, it’s difficult to provide another roadmap for reclaiming literature’s place in the glassed-over public eye, and I’m sympathetic to disentangling academic literary efforts from on-the-ground political action or public service.
But the question remains: how should a critic, literally, operate? One of her most salient responses was a push back against the demand for a consistent definition of close reading. She insisted that literary criticism doesn’t need to “compete with the sciences” for axiomatic methods, that criticism is “not method-based but object-based,” and those objects are so full of singular pleasures that a dry ten-step process would kill their artistry. Instead, she implored us to track our felt response to the text and figure out what provoked them.
With that, Emre provided her own counterpoint to my objections over the pitch-deck feel of her lecture. Art is a living thing and the further you get from it, the more you venture into layers of abstraction, the less you gain from it being art. Like the adage about jokes, artworks are like frogs—you can dissect them, but you’d have to kill them first. Literary dissection is fun and informative in its own right but please, once in a while, put away the critical checklist and touch some paper.
Critically,
Reilly Pryma
Image: Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Samuel Johnson, oil on canvas, ca. 1775 (Huntington Library, California).