FOL University - Merve Emre - The Responsibilities of the Literary Critic

The Friends of the Library is proud to welcome Schreiber High School graduate and University of Oxford English professor, Merve Emre, as part of its popular FOL University series. Professor Emre will explore such questions as: What is the function of criticism at the present time? What, if any, are the responsibilities of the critic? To begin to answer these questions, this talk draws on the writings of exemplary literary critics of the past—T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick—to map a future for criticism. It stresses the importance of judgment and justification, aesthetics and politics, and finally, the interrelation between life and literature.

Dr. Emre, who received a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D from Yale, is the author of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021), Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), The Ferrante Letters (2019), and The Personality Brokers (2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times. She is also a highly regarded literary critic with reviews appearing in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other publications. In 2022, she will serve as one of the judges of the International Booker Prize.
(Recorded on 1/23/22)

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