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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen around 150 people gathered on Feb. 8 in Sever 113 — the kind of classic wood-paneled lecture hall in which one fantasizes about studying the great novels — for an English department debate on the subject “Should Criticism Be A Profession?” the room was full of partisans. Merve G. Emre ’07, the guest of honor, spent her undergraduate years as a Government concentrator at Harvard, worked at Bain Consulting Group, and pursued a Ph.D. in English at Yale before beginning an ascendant literary career. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, writing electric, witty essays on everything from capital-G Great Books to Sally Rooney, and a Wesleyan professor of criticism and creative writing. That night, her charge was to speak on her chosen profession.
Emre does with style what university task forces can only wish to achieve: she makes Joyce and Milton urgent; she interprets with the magnetic cult of personality only the most cherished professors attain. For this, she is obviously beloved by the faculty of her alma mater — the event had an air of homecoming. But her star status in America’s most illustrious magazine did not go unnoticed by the many faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates in attendance.
It is no secret that the humanities are in crisis. Enrollment in English and history departments has dropped by a third in the last decade. Harvard’s pre-professional culture makes concentrations that don’t directly lead to a career seem retrograde. Emre, then, is a chimera — unapologetically canonical and unapologetically cool.
In some ways, Emre delivered her remarks in a traditionally professorial fashion, reading double-spaced type, her wrist arcing gracefully each time she set a finished page atop the last. But she also wore four-inch open-toed green stilettos and looked out at her audience with an almost overwhelming intensity.
“This feels a little like my fantasy faculty Premier League draft,” Emre began, leading into remarks not on her New Yorker writing — the obvious reason for the full room — but criticism as the broad category that goes on within English departments:
“I find that the question that frames my remarks — should criticism be a profession? — has a fairly banal answer. Yes, because I admire so many of you as readers and writers. Yes, because I would like to see your practices of reading and writing transmitted to the students in this room. And yes, because I have been formally and informally instructed by you. I have been educated by your words for almost two decades now, beginning when I was an undergraduate.”
Emre’s ‘yes’ was, by her own admission, banal. Yes, because what we do is good. Because her work is an outgrowth of the larger project. Because it will not happen otherwise. She did not attempt to truly defend criticism for an academic or popular audience — to me, her remarks focused almost entirely on the structure and functioning of academia, a taxonomy of labor norms and cultural presuppositions. Why, I wanted to ask, was this her angle? Why should we look at the hierarchical functioning of the university departments instead of the goal of those departments?
Like everyone in the room, I entered Emre’s orbit with both a crush and a hope that she might have the cure for the particular depression that afflicts all humanities majors of the 21st century. As I prepared to write this article, I spent two afternoons luxuriating in her prose. Emre’s essays are sexy and insightful, daring and poignant. In an interview with Lydia Davis, her masterful reading is on full display. With the right questions, she brings Davis to reflect on the sound and origin of her stories — the distinctively human observation that makes a piece of fiction feel inescapably true. I immediately placed a pick-up request on HOLLIS.
As I read, I wondered if Emre was going to tell me she taught criticism instead of English because this way of reading and writing addressed the image problem of English departments: Emre is anything but stale or outdated. So when I met her for coffee in the afternoon before the event, I thought maybe, just maybe, she would have a grand vision. Maybe she would tell me the problem was the undergraduate essay, that we should be teaching students to write magazine-style pieces instead. Maybe learning aesthetic judgment was the answer to our collective political woes. Maybe criticism is the future.
But Emre does not think any of these things — or at least, she did not claim them.
As we sat in the Smith Center balcony and looked out at Harvard Yard, she resisted all my attempts to elicit such proclamations. Criticism as she teaches it, she argued, is a different way of writing, not a replacement for standard English papers. Humanities education is an end in and of itself. “The most important moral obligation of the professoriate,” she told me, “is to preserve and transmit the works that have no other means of circulation.”
Back in the lecture hall, after Emre’s opening remarks, the audience seemed confused. Emre had delivered a speech on the recent history of the professoriate as a profession, and drawn a mild distinction between what she teaches and English classes in general. Sensing our collective apprehension, she ended, “And if you were here to listen to me talk about writing for The New Yorker, just go talk to James,” referring to Harvard English professor and literary critic James Wood.
But then Emre’s interlocutor, Beth Blum, stood up. More soft-spoken and meandering than Emre, Blum had preempted the impossibility of Emre’s position. In the tradition of earnest academics, Blum brought the conversation to Plato, perhaps the foundational thinker of the Western tradition. She cited the Ion dialogue, one of his lesser-known works, and, from the podium, explained the setup.
Ion — a rhapsode, or reciter and interpreter of poetry (the ancient version of an English professor) — has just won a competition reciting Homer, and is full of his own talent and success. But Socrates, persistently asking after the nature of Ion’s distinct skill, leads him to two opposite absurdities: either the rhapsode knows next to nothing, or the rhapsode is as skilled as a general. Though it should perhaps be the personal rule of most of us not to play any part but Socrates without thorough briefing, Blum gave Emre a copy of the script and cast herself as Socrates.
“Can you position me?” Emre asked.
“You can stay there. You can sit. We’re just reading,” Blum replied.
Emre stood anyway, and they performed:
Socrates: Then he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general?
Ion: Certainly Socrates.
Socrates: And he who is a good general is also a good rhapsode?
Ion: No, I do not say this,
Socrates: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general?
Ion: Certainly.
Socrates: And you are the best of Hellenic rhapsodes?
Ion: Far the best Socrates.
Socrates: And are you the best general, Ion?
Ion: To be sure, Socrates, and Homer was my master.
Socrates: But then Ion, what in the name of goodness can be the reason why you, who are the best of generals, as well as the best of rhapsodes in all of Greece, go about as a rhapsode when you might be a general? Do you think that the Greeks want a rhapsode with his golden crown and do not want in general?
The point Blum was trying to make, I think, is that there is something woefully ineffable about recounting and interpreting literature. The defense of the humanities often swings wildly between minutiae and megalomania — they are both nothing but fancy words, and the most profound achievement of mankind. A craftsman can interpret Homer better than Ion can, and Ion is the greatest general in all of Greece.
As Ion illustrates, you cannot defend studying English in the same manner as NIH research — its benefits are not quantifiable. And so we shouldn’t be surprised by Emre’s obscure defense. I had wanted Emre to claim the role of the general, but she confined herself to a more modest position.
Should criticism be a profession? Should English departments keep teaching classic texts? The answer, for Emre, for Blum, is obviously yes (and I agree). But as Emre’s nearly empty speech demonstrated, that yes resists explanation — not just now, in this particular moment of skepticism, but across time.
Blum ended her remarks by saying:
Should literary criticism be a profession? That is the title of this event, and it is also to me, the question that Socrates raises. And we are a little better at answering it today than Ion was in his. We are still trying to offer a persuasive account of how criticism is or is not knowledge, resembles and diverges from art. We are still fumbling around like Ion for validation.
There is no perfect defense. While there are many good, albeit partial, ones, ultimately the defense is the writing itself. We don’t need Emre to claim to be the best general in all of Greece. We just need to read her essay on Paradise Lost, a poem written 350 years ago, and listen as she urges us to read aloud Milton’s eerily beautiful open: “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe.” We need to read as Emre brings the strange grandeur of these lines into her contemporary reflections on sexuality and good governance and the nature of making art.
At the end of the debate, an English Ph.D. student asked Emre if she had any advice for those in her position.
“Marry rich,” Emre quipped — only partially joking.
“Jesus Christ,” someone in the audience said.
“Jesus Christ,” Emre repeated.
—Magazine writer Hannah W. Duane can be reached at hannah.duane@thecrimson.com.
