Merve Emre has a CV to tremble before. She is the author of three award-winning books, is a contributing writer at the New Yorker, regularly travels the world speaking at conferences and universities, interviews authors of the likes of Sally Rooney and Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, and is the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.

 

Many individuals with such aspirational careers seem untouchable, their trajectories mysterious. There is only so much LinkedIn stalking, for instance, one can do, retracing someone’s official steps, before realising that the real information is missing. One might wonder they felt when they were 20, how they came across their career opportunities, and whether they were also as terrified as I am now. My question is, at its core, how Emre got from where she was in the early 2000s, a bright undergraduate at Harvard not too dissimilar from the most ambitious among us here at Oxford, to where she is now?

 

Emre starts every episode of her podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, which debuted last year, by asking her guests the same question. In this way, Emre merges established intellectuals and aspiring critics and writers (like, I presume, many of The Isis’s readers) into a truly multiple “public”. Her podcast consists of roughly 45-minute interviews with female critics with various specialisations. Episodes are divided into a discussion about the guest’s career, and an electric segment of on-the-spot criticism. Emre presents each episode’s critic with a surprise object to critique, and nothing is off the table: poems, photographs, the podcast itself are all scrutinised. Guests must discuss this object in front of a live audience, making judgements which are, as Emre says in the podcast’s introduction, sometimes right…and sometimes wrong.

 

She made the time to sit down with me over Zoom last Michaelmas to discuss The Critic and Her Publics, and the ways the podcast form can democratise access to high quality criticism and introduce students to criticism as a serious career path.

 

Emre is not new to addressing undergraduates as a serious public. When she writes public-facing criticism for the New Yorker or New York Review of Books, Emre asks herself: “If I had to teach this work or if I had to teach this author to a seminar of well-read 20 to 21-year-olds, how would I teach it?” She sensitively switches registers, speaking to students like me with as much respect and ease as to Sally Rooney in their interview for The Paris Review last year. She relishes in the “flexibility in terms of who you imagine the public to be and how you instantiate that public based on your rhetorical strategies in what you’re writing or how you’re speaking” that, she argues, is what distinguishes “criticism” from “scholarship”, which involves posturing oneself towards other professional scholars.

 

Interested in splitting hairs even further and identifying what made podcast criticism distinct from other forms, I hone in on “what you’re writing or how you’re speaking”. What is the relationship between written and oral forms in her work? Emre explains that, due to the editing process, there is a “fascinating back and forth between the oral and the textual” behind the scenes of her podcast. As people’s awkward pauses or false starts get edited out and questions and answers are moved around, the episode begins to develop a “much more coherent and argumentative arc.” This editing process allows Emre to exploit the porousness between the oral and the written “while perpetuating the fantasy of unadulterated oral exchange.”

 

Fantasy is a keyword here. When I ask her why she chose the podcast form as opposed to say, a YouTube series, she expresses doubts that her ideal audience would enjoy an audiovisual version, since she herself prefers to listen to the audio of recorded literary events. I suggest that the awkwardness of seeing someone’s face might disrupt the illusion of intimacy one feels when a voice over a podcast speaks into your ear, and Emre lights up. She adds: “You want their voice loving you or seducing you with its readings, but you don’t actually want to confront the physical reality of that person.”

 

Part of the charm of The Critic and Her Publics, however, is the moments that draw attention to the physical reality of Emre or her guests: the ums, the ahs, the laughter, the pauses that do make the final cut. Emre insists that these “moments where speech fails or is revised are completely essential to the aesthetic of each person’s performance.” She brings up the example of the literary critic and Oxford alum Jo Livingstone, who is called on to critique a medievalist choral performance. Livingstone’s style of speech, with frequent pauses and revisions which “always verges on the slightly mystical”, aligns well with her written work, which often focuses on the writings of Margery Kempe. The ultimate goal of editing is not to smooth out the idiosyncratic rhythms of speech, but to create a sense of cohesion between herself, her guest, and the object she carefully selects for them to critique, a process she describes as “triangulation”.

 

Whether edited or not, Emre is able to pull off this delicate “triangulation” in part because of her extraordinary chemistry with her guests. Some, like Anahid Neressesian, are longtime friends; Hannah Goldfield’s food criticism appears alongside Emre’s work in the New Yorker. Surely a careful selection process for guests contributes toward the podcast’s success? She explains that she chose people “whose work I admired, and whom I could offer up to my students as a model for what they could do.” To present an accurate impression of the full range of contemporary criticism, she insists upon a diversity of objects being critiqued, that the podcast includes “people who were writing music criticism, literary criticism, cultural criticism, film criticism.” This variety furthers Emre’s core project, which is to show there is not just one right way to perform criticism, and anything may be thought of critically.

 

But the diversity in Emre’s podcast goes further than the objects critiqued. The Critic and Her Publics features, for example, trans essayist Andrea Long Chu, Haitian-American cultural critic Doreen St. Félix, and Iranian-American academic Nersessian. Part of Emre’s project is to show that everyone can be a critic by giving diverse examples of women who already are, regardless of their social background, gender identity, or race. (In fact, Emre shared tantalising details of Season 3 of the podcast, already recorded, which will focus on translation; one episode features a discussion of a woman of colour’s experience of translating 1001 Nights, a text haunted by its patriarchal, Orientalist translation history.)

 

Emre believes that reading literature is an experience that is always social, whether you are keeping company with fellow readers or with the author’s mind. She argues, drawing on Stanley Cavell’s reading of Kant, that “judgement isn’t just the subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure in one’s encounter with an object, but the compulsion to make that pleasure or displeasure known to somebody else, even if that somebody else isn’t an embodied presence, sitting right across from you at a table or on a Zoom call”. Even though Emre enters each episode with an idea of questions she wants to ask and certain readings of the episode’s mystery object, she concentrates on listening to the person opposite her sharing their judgements and remains open to changing her mind. “There is the desire on my part, and I think on the part of my guests as well,” Emre says, “to model for students that criticism isn’t about being right. It’s not about having the final word on a work of art because how boring would that be? It’s about play. Criticism is about learning how to play, both within your own mind and with the minds of other people.”

 

I immediately made the connection between the inherent playfulness and social aspect of criticism with the Oxford tutorial system. Merve, who was a tutor at Worcester College before joining the faculty at Wesleyan, believes her podcast is “much more the model of the seminar room than the tutorial”. She apologetically cited her “incorrigible Americanness” as the potential source of her view, but astutely critiqued the uneven power dynamics at play between tutor and student in such an intensely intimate, one-on-one setting. She argues that the Oxford tutorial model precludes free critical play, especially when contrasted with the seminar room “where you have between 12-20 people sitting around a table together, throwing ideas back and forth”. With a sparkle in her eye, Emre rhapsodised about the seminar room: “The greatest moment for me is when it feels like the conversation has a life of its own, independent from the people participating in it. I always get a kind of buzzy feeling, and when I’m done with class I can feel the after-effects of that linger for another couple of hours.”

 

Emre seems intent on spreading that buzzy feeling to as many people as possible, democratising access to exciting intellectual conversation beyond the academy’s tall fences. She sees her podcast as “initiating people who are not primarily scholars into practices of thinking and writing that have been for a long time, coded or categorised as scholarly.” One such mode of thinking is the kind of close reading performed in the final segment of each episode. She says, drawing on arguments first laid out in Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017): “when we think of lay readers, we think of them reading in ways that are not particularly close or careful. We think about them identifying with characters, falling in love with characters, reading books imitatively to figure out how they can adopt the lifestyles of the people in the books. But I’m increasingly interested in how those practices of reading do have a critical apparatus that attends to them, and how the practices of reading that are perpetuated or reproduced in the literature classroom can be introduced to readers who aren’t in the classroom.”

 

Whenever she imagines her podcast audience—which she is careful to distinguish from a public, “which is necessarily imaginary and disembodied”—she pictures her sister, a doctor squarely outside the literature classroom who gives Emre feedback over text messages. Emre’s mother is her usual go-to audience stand-in when she writes, but she doubts that her “chatty” mother “could stand listening to other people talk without being able to speak back to them”. “A bad listener?” I suggest. Emre laughs in agreement, but confesses that she can “completely understand” her mother’s attitude since she is not a regular podcast listener either.

 

Some guests of The Critic and Her Publics have had to put in more work to bridge the gap between the live recording event and podcast, whether in audio or transcript form. Emre is eager to discuss how her guests go about matching their critical skills with the object they are critiquing. Food critic Hannah Goldfield, for instance, is called upon to taste and critique a series of homemade cookies, which involves more description than analysis. Emre comments: “My favourite part about Hannah’s episode was the way she described developing a vocabulary of metaphor for the food that she was eating so that people could pretend like they were having the experience of eating it.”

 

Visual art presents a similar challenge. Emre presents Doreen St. Felix and Lauren Michelle Jackson with visual objects that require them to “figure out how to ekphrastically render for the listeners something that they could not themselves see” on the spot. Emre summarises: “Different objects demand a different repertoire of practices.” And, sometimes, the format of The Critic and Her Publics isn’t conducive to particular kinds of criticism. The final episode of Season 1 features writer and literature scholar Christine Smallwood who, upon being given an extract from George Elliot’s Middlemarch, turns the podcast’s format on its head. She resists Emre’s request for her to critique a passage out of context, since, she argues, this is not the most productive way to approach long form texts. As Merve acknowledges to me: “When we’re talking about something like a novel, drilling down to the sentence level is often a lot less interesting.” She relishes in Smallwood’s subtle rebellion and how this questions her Kantian assumptions about how criticism should be performed.

 

The conversation between Emre and her guest—especially when they challenge each other like in Smallwood’s episode—is often more interesting than the object being critiqued, and reflects her longstanding interest in the conversation as a critical mode. Emre’s first public exploration of the mode is The Ferrante Letters (2019), co-authored with Sarah Chihaya, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards. The four friends corresponded so brilliantly with one another about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet that Columbia University Press published it. Emre feels, however, that the temporal quality of their epistolary criticism restricted the “spontaneity” she is “aspiring to in the conversation format”, given how, “in the process of writing back, you become self-conscious. You think about what you are writing in ways that prompt you to edit it, to excessively revise your initial responses.”

 

“The podcast is a way of literalising the metaphor of criticism as conversation that was already seeded in The Ferrante Letters,” Emre explains. This project is not without its challenges. The jokes, gestures, and facial expressions which convey so much in conversations can never be fully captured in a podcast transcript. In a typically Emre metacritical twist, she tells me that “anybody who has had the experience that you’re about to have of transcribing our conversation and editing it will just feel that a certain dimension of what we’ve experienced is missing.”

 

And she is right: I have spent many hours pouring over the transcript of this interview, rewriting it in different ways, cutting several favourite moments, and fretting over the creation of a coherent argumentative arc. The goal is to maintain—as Emre tells me she and her editor try to do with the podcast—fidelity to the original occasion. You tell me, good readers, whether I captured the flow of authentic conversation.∎

 

Words by Laura Brink. Image courtesy of Merve Emre.