Merve Emre (b. 1985) belongs to the cohort of American critics who came up as the humanities lost their old footing and criticism migrated from the seminar room to the prestige magazine, the podcast, and the festival stage. She was born in Adana, Turkey, raised partly in the United States, and graduated from Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York, in 2003. She took her BA at Harvard in 2007, where she concentrated in Government, spent a short and self-described unhappy stint as a consultant at Bain, then earned a PhD in English at Yale. She taught at McGill, moved to Oxford in 2018 as associate professor of American literature and a fellow of Worcester College, and in 2023 took up the Shapiro-Silverberg chair in Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan, where she directs the Shapiro Center. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and has won the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle’s Balakian Citation.
Her scholarship sits at the seam between close reading and the sociology of institutions. Her first book, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), studies the reading practices elite culture dismissed as middlebrow or therapeutic and treats them as contests over who holds the authority to define good reading. Her popular breakthrough, The Personality Brokers (2018), tracks the Myers-Briggs test from the kitchen-table ambitions of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers into corporate and educational life, and reads it as a technology for converting inner life into sortable, marketable categories. The Ferrante Letters (2019) stages criticism as a collective rather than solitary act. Across the work runs one preoccupation: how institutions render human interiority legible so they can manage it.
As a critic, Emre pays attention to form and style with a corresponding wariness toward criticism organized around identification, affect, and biographical disclosure. Her methodological signature is the movement from close reading of a narrow object toward a broader account of the institutions, markets, and professional incentives that shape literary culture, and her prose is marked by compression and a controlled, judging tone. Commentators frequently place her in the lineage of the New York intellectual critics, among them Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), and Susan Sontag (1933-2004), for whom criticism functioned as a literary performance rather than a delivery of information.
Her work also engages translation and the circulation of international literature, with sustained attention to Elena Ferrante, Clarice Lispector, and Magda Szabó, and to the institutional processes by which foreign writers enter the Anglophone canon. She hosts the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, produced with the New York Review and Literary Hub. Across her positions as scholar, editor, magazine critic, and program director, her central concern remains the standing of literary judgment and serious reading within a fragmented contemporary media and academic environment.
Serious Reading
What does Emre mean by “serious reading?”
In her usage it means reading that attends to how a text is made rather than only to what it is about. The serious reader watches the form, the style, the structure, the choices in the prose, and holds the book at a distance as an object to be judged. He discriminates quality. He does not read to see himself, to be consoled, to have his identity confirmed, or to certify his morals. That is the whole content of the term as she deploys it. Serious reading is formal, evaluative, distanced, and trained. The unserious kind is affective, identificatory, therapeutic, and content-driven, the reading she spends her essays prosecuting.
So much for what it denotes. The word does more than denote.
“Serious” is not a description. It is a verdict wearing the costume of a description. Among Emre’s intellectual class it is one of the highest honors a man can be paid and “unserious” one of the sharpest dismissals, and Emre knows this. By naming her preferred mode the serious one, she ranks every other mode beneath it before a single argument is made. The honorific does the work that evidence would otherwise have to do. Call your way of reading serious and you have already won, because the other side is now, by the grammar of the word, frivolous.
The term is also circular. Serious reading turns out to be the reading that serious readers do, and the serious readers are the critics who read the way she reads. Her particular practice gets installed as the measure of seriousness as such. The standard and the practitioner define each other.
And it erases the situation. There is no serious reading in the abstract. There is reading fit to its purpose. Close attention to a contract is serious for that purpose. Reading a thriller for pleasure on a plane is serious about pleasure and answers fully to its occasion. Freeze “serious reading” into a fixed kind and you lose the truth that one man reads many ways in a day, each way right for its moment.
Emre says she is surprised how few critics engage the text and how much criticism is feeling and hand-waving at plot and theme. Her premise is that the proper object of criticism is form and judgment, and that self-disclosure is failure. That is a position in a long fight, against Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” against reader-response, against the affective turn. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) argued the opposite case with force. Emre states her side as obvious. The irony is exact. She charges confessional critics with assuming the primacy of the self, and she assumes the primacy of formal judgment. Both assume. Only one gets called out, and she is the one doing the calling.
Emre holds that Elena Ferrante’s refusal of the biographical has lodged the biographical ever deeper into the heart of what she writes. It is a good paradox. It is also asserted rather than shown. The premise that anonymity intensifies biographical hunger rather than killing it is plausible and contestable, and she presents it as a finding. Clever, unearned, delivered to a room that enjoys paradox and will not ask for the proof.
The method is asserting rather than showing.
It applies anywhere a writer addresses an audience that already shares his premises, so that recognition can stand in for proof. The tell is small and consistent. The writer says “X explains” where he should say “X claims.” He opens with a missing antecedent that assumes you already know the referent. He ranks one thing above another and treats the ranking as a fact about the world rather than his taste. The contested premise sits in the floor of the sentence, never on the table.
Academic theory written for peers. Large stretches of cultural studies, critical theory, and literary scholarship run on premises the field stopped arguing decades ago. That power saturates everything, that the self is a construct, that the aesthetic masks the economic. These are positions. Inside the seminar they function as weather. A scholar can build a whole essay on them and never once defend them, because no one in the room will ask. The vocabulary becomes a password. Use “legibility” or “biopolitics” or “the gimmick” correctly and you are in. The price of admission is agreement, and the agreement does the work argument should do.
Sianne Ngai (b. 1971) defines the gimmick as a form that saves labor and reads at once as a marvel and a fraud, and Emre uses it to make a management framework and a celebrated novel converge as twin technologies of reassurance. Watch what produced that convergence. The frame did. If your instrument says “anything reassuring is a capitalist device for flattening complexity,” then everything reassuring will come out looking like everything else, and a personality quiz will rhyme with a Sally Rooney novel. The likeness is not found in the world. It is manufactured by the lens. A demystifier who only owns one solvent will report that everything dissolves. That is not a discovery about the objects. It is a fact about the solvent.
Op-ed and magazine commentary, left and right alike. The New York Times columnist who treats a contested empirical claim as settled because his readers nod. The conservative essayist who writes “of course the regime is lawless” to a readership that already believes it. Neither earns the premise. Both bank on the choir. David Brooks (b. 1961) does a genteel version, asserting a sociological claim about American character as if it were observed rather than asserted. The talk-radio host does a loud version. Same structure.
Expert policy writing. The economist who states a model’s assumptions as facts to other economists. The foreign-policy analyst who treats “credibility” or “deterrence” as a settled good rather than a contestable theory. Among experts the framework is assumed, so the argument starts three steps in, and the three skipped steps are the ones a layman would want defended.
Religious apologetics and communal sermonizing. The preacher and the apologist write to the committed. The hardest claims, the ones an outsider would challenge first, are the ones stated with least support, because the audience grants them at the door. Adventist defenses of the investigative judgment, Orthodox defenses of a particular halachic line, Sydney Anglican readings of headship, all can run this way: the disputed premise asserted as obvious to those who already hold it.
The vice requires two things at once. The premise must be live and contested, and the audience’s agreement must be carrying the load that argument should carry. If a biologist assumes common descent in front of other biologists, that is not the vice. That is economy, because the premise is settled and his readers are competent to grant it. The charge sticks only when the writer takes something genuinely in dispute, something a reasonable opponent rejects, and slides it past the reader on the strength of shared membership rather than evidence. Emre does this when she ranks the impersonal essay above the personal one and treats the ranking as taste-free. A biologist citing evolution does not.
Find the load-bearing premise. Ask whether a competent, honest opponent would grant it. If yes, the writer is being efficient. If no, and the writer states it as settled anyway, you have caught him relying on the room instead of the argument.
Wedding
Emre married architect Christian Nakarado in 2015. No public wedding announcements appeared in major newspapers or magazines for their marriage. The only public record of the event is their online wedding registry on The Knot, which notes their wedding date as December 12, 2015, in Brooklyn, New York.
By 2014, Emre had a Yale PhD, a McGill faculty appointment, and the beginnings of a literary career. Nakarado had a Yale degree and an architecture practice. The NYT wedding announcement was within reach. They did not seek it.
The NYT wedding announcement is the canonical Pinsofian artifact for the educated American class. It claims to celebrate love. It also displays family connections, degrees, jobs, and the implied confirmation that two people of comparable status have paired off. The paradox works because readers pretend to be celebrating love while reading the credentials. Sacred value (love, family, ritual) buries the status work (matching, position, parental bragging rights).
Two readings of the absence.
The first: they did not qualify or did not care to compete. Possible but unlikely given their credentials by 2014.
The second, which fits the rest of the pattern: the absence of the announcement was the announcement. Among certain Brooklyn literary-academic circles in the mid-2010s, the NYT wedding announcement had become slightly gauche. The status game had partly collapsed for that crowd. To do the announcement was to signal you needed to. To skip it was to signal you didn’t. This is Pinsof’s stealth-wealth pattern. Old money does inconspicuous consumption. Established taste does inconspicuous ceremony. The signal: we are above the NYT page, we don’t need the credentials laid out, we are confident enough in our position to do this in private.
The pattern across the marriage supports the second reading. The legal license was issued June 28, 2014, in Manhattan. The ceremony followed eighteen months later, December 12, 2015, in Brooklyn. The Knot registry is the only public record. They had two children. The marriage proceeded without ceremonial fanfare in any public-facing literary venue.
Then the public performances begin. The 2022 NYRB interview invokes Christian as the loving husband who reads her proofs and fights with her over the writing. The 2025 Argus Valentine’s Day piece performs the marriage in posed photos and banter for the student paper. The marriage itself was kept private. The marriage’s literary value was made public.
Pinsof’s framework explains the asymmetry. Sacred values are deployed when they serve the status game and withheld when they don’t. In 2014-2015, the literary-couple brand was not yet useful to Emre’s career. She was at McGill, building toward Oxford. A NYT wedding announcement might have read as parents-bragging-for-the-daughter rather than as a deployment of literary identity. By 2022, she was a public critic at the NYRB. The Hardwick essay needed a married speaker to do the wife/critic/mistress argument with the proper authority. The “married me so life would never be boring” line worked because there was a real husband and a real marriage backing it. By 2025, the marriage was the brand. The Argus piece tried to keep the brand alive.
Then the brand failed.
The hidden timeline is the interesting thing. Eleven years from license to divorce. The first seven years produced no public literary artifact of the marriage. The middle years produced occasional husband-references in interviews. The final year produced the most public artifact of the marriage and ended six months later. Pinsof predicts that paradox players time their displays. Public performance of a private status often peaks just as the private status begins slipping. The Argus piece is the heaviest, latest display. It is also the closest to the collapse. The pattern fits.
The Knot registry as the only public artifact of the wedding is also Pinsofian. Registries are practical. They are explicit transactions: give us this object, we provide social acknowledgment. The Knot is the corporate channel for the part of weddings that everyone knows is corporate. To leave the Knot as the only public record is to acknowledge the transactional layer of the wedding while suppressing the ceremonial layer. Pinsof predicts that a player confident in her status game can afford to show the commercial layer because she does not need the ceremonial layer for cover. The couple who needs the public ritual of the wedding announcement is the couple who needs the cover. Emre and Nakarado did not need it. They were confident enough to skip it.
The confidence proved misplaced. The marriage ended. The literary brand built on it now reads as a long performance with no public origin point. The only origin trace is a gift registry. The end is a Wikipedia note. The middle is the literary record. Pinsof’s framework allows that a paradox player can run the game for decades. The Emre case shows that long enough is not forever. Eleven years was the run. Then the paradox caught her.
‘Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks’ (The New Yorker, Nov. 9, 2020)
The essay is smart and well-paced. Merve Emre handles Sianne Ngai’s argument fairly, then builds to a closing reversal: perhaps Ngai’s own theory is a gimmick. The ending satisfies, but it is suspiciously tidy. The last move has the same shape as the device Emre has spent the piece describing—a clever turn that compresses labor and pulls value out of a small surface trick.
The Marxist scaffolding carries a lot of weight in Ngai‘s account. Calling something a gimmick supposedly registers discomfort with capitalism’s manipulation of value and time. But people called things gimmicks before Karl Marx (1818-1883) gave them a vocabulary, and people in non-capitalist settings have words for analogous things: cheap tricks, sleight of hand, hollow show, charlatanry. Tying the judgment so tightly to capital reads later theory back into older ordinary language.
The historical claim that pre-Renaissance devices were received “without suspicion” seems wrong. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) complained about the deus ex machina. Medieval audiences had categories for relic fraud and alchemical hoax. The gimmick may be older than Ngai’s periodization allows, and the suspicion older still.
Emre‘s strongest passages cover James Joyce (1882-1941), Henry James, and Helen DeWitt (b. 1957).The Bloom passage about “smart girls writing” in a shop window is well chosen, and the reading of Lightning Rods is sharp. The DeWitt example earns its place because the novel itself thematizes the gimmick, so the critic is not forcing a reading onto an indifferent text.
The weakest moment comes when Ngai writes that capitalism’s labor-saving device is “just simply a woman.” That sentence aims for shock and pays for it. Domestic labor and undervalued female work predate industrial capital by millennia. The line works as polemic, not analysis.
Emre notices the central problem and lets it drop. If gimmicks are everywhere, the category loses its bite. A theory that covers Jennifer Egan’s (b. 1962) PowerPoint chapter, Kanye West’s campaign, robot chefs, Amazon’s drone, modernist self-reference, and most of post-Renaissance art is doing too much. Emre raises the worry and steps around it, perhaps because pressing it might unravel the review’s own structure.
The piece does one thing well that most reviews of academic books miss: it makes you want to read Ngai while leaving you with a usable skepticism. You finish with a working sense of what she argues, why it appeals, and where the argument thins.
‘Two Paths for the Personal Essay: The personal essay is not dead, but has it traded politics for style?’ (Aug. 22, 2017)
For a certain breed of personal essayist at work today, there exists a necessary and desirable trade-off between aesthetic clarity and moral complexity; a bargain premised on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones. The adjective that best captures the conditions of this bargain is messy. Messy feelings, messy reality, messy relationships, the messy unfiltered stuff of life; the personal essayist evacuates all in one, big messy outpouring of repurposed clichés about love and life and pain and joy and men and women and whatever other themes readers of these essayists are, by now, primed to receive as universal human concerns. “Style is character,” Joan Didion proclaimed in her 1979 essay collection The White Album. However imprecise this statement of equivalence may be, one suspects that it has been thoroughly internalized by personal essayists today who elide aesthetic judgments—judgments about the formal or stylistic features of prose—with ethical and subjective ones that assess the character of the human being who would produce such prose…
Taking an unapologetically snobbish tone in her 1905 essay “The Decay of Essay Writing,” Virginia Woolf lamented how the nineteenth-century democratization of literacy had flooded the literary marketplace with personal essays. A new class of writers, blinkered by the “amazing and unclothed egoism” that came from asserting one’s importance through reading and writing, thought nothing of sacrificing “their beliefs to the turn of a phrase or the glitter of paradox,” Woolf complained. Theirs was a mass demonstration of newly acquired cultural capital over and above any aesthetic or political purpose they may have had for putting pen to paper in the first place. “You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast in the form of the essay,” Woolf wrote, scolding those middle-class writers who would dare leave their grubby prints on the windowpane of good prose. If one can set aside her disdain, there is a larger point: too many people writing have nothing interesting to say and no interesting way in which to say it.
If, in the early twentieth century, the “I” of the personal essay bespoke the educated man or woman, then today it inaugurates the mindful one; the subject whose apparently infinite capacity for self-reflexivity trades the precision of language and thought for “the baggy fit of feelings before they’ve found their purpose” (Chew-Bose again). Yet the shamelessness with which the bargain is brokered these days can leave a reader feeling like something cheap and tawdry is at work: a shortcut hacked through the dense thicket of form and feeling. More than the lack of conviction or the preciousness of prose, it is the peacocking of the author that chafes. What should we make of writing that serves primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to present the author as a more admirably complicated type of human subject than others? It is the literary equivalent of the ill-mannered man who, thinking himself to be very mature, declares, “I may be an asshole, but look how self-aware I am about it.”
Emre has objects in front of her, two books, and she reads them. The Chew-Bose mockery lands because the sentences she quotes earn it. “Writing is a closed pistachio shell” is twee, and the catalog of italicized onomatopoeia and the “I may be an asshole, but look how self-aware I am” line catch a real failure mode in a real book. The Gaitskill reading is rich. The mask and the mechanicalness give her a through-line into a major writer, and the Nelson material on unsentimentality, the Arendt letter to Scholem, the distinction between empathy and attention, is substantive and partly argued. So the charge from before, that she states as settled what she has not earned, bites less here. She works for more of it.
Now the cheats, and they are at the joints, not the surface.
The binary is rigged before the contest starts. Two paths, one author each, and she picks a debut essayist to stand for the path she means to bury and a master with thirty years of work to stand for the path she means to crown. Durga Chew-Bose against Mary Gaitskill (b. 1954) is not a fair fight, and presenting it as a choice between modes lets the casting do the arguing. An honest comparison sets Gaitskill against the best of the lyric and confessional tradition, against James Baldwin, against the strongest instance of the warm essay, not against a first book she can dismantle sentence by sentence. She defines the path she hates by its worst case and the path she loves by its best, then calls the gap a difference of kind.
The standard is smuggled, not defended. Clarity, precision, particularity, coldness. These are her criteria, and she treats “messy” as a synonym for failure, as if difficulty and the fragment and the deliberate withholding of resolution were never anything but self-indulgence. The lyric essay has a tradition. Modernist difficulty has a defense. She grants no working version of the messy, because admitting one would force her to argue for her standard rather than assume it. The opponent who would say “the unfinished is itself a form” is not in the room.
She never admits her own taste is a tradition with a history. This is the joint the VIDA critic found. Emre faults Chew-Bose for an aesthetic that hallows complex selfhood, while hallowing an aesthetic of unsentimental clarity that descends from a particular European and modernist line. She presents the cold style as neutral ground, as the absence of pose, when it is as much a pose as the warm one. Arendt and Weil (1909-1943) and Didion (1934-2021) chose coldness as a strategy with its own ethics and its own blind spots. Emre treats that choice as the floor of the room rather than one option in it. The cold essay is not the view from nowhere. She writes as if it were.
Emre faults Chew-Bose for being apolitical, bereft of any shared ethical position. Then she crowns a tradition whose whole program is the evacuation of feeling and the refusal of emotional-political appeal. So is the sin that Chew-Bose has no politics, or that she has the wrong, identity-shaped politics? The essay wants both at once and resolves neither. When she handles the one passage about Chew-Bose’s non-white name, she grants the promise of a point and then says it never arrives. Fair enough as a reading of that paragraph. But she rides that single failure to “self-fetishization” and uses it to dismiss the racialized first person wholesale, and she never sets it beside a case where that “I” does real political work. One weak handling stands in for a whole mode.
She praises in Gaitskill the very things she damns in Chew-Bose. Gaitskill’s tone “brooks no disagreement.” Gaitskill snaps “Bitch, please” and delivers verdicts without argument. Emre calls this the relief of a grownup in the room laying down the law. That is judgment as pure authority, the standard assumed, the reader expected to nod. In a confessional writer she calls this peacocking. In her hero she calls it maturity. The difference is not in the move. The difference is that she approves of one of them. And the persona she admires, cold, authoritative, brooking no disagreement, is her own. She is praising the critic she wants to be.
Gaitskill’s essays are full of the first person. The conversion, the stripper, the bridge in Saint Petersburg, the head wound. So the real distinction is not personal against impersonal. Both are personal. The distinction is cold-and-controlled against warm-and-sprawling, a difference of handling and degree. By naming it “two paths,” one personal and one something higher, she sells a difference of degree as a difference of kind, and claims for Gaitskill a transcendence of the self that the prose does not perform. The stripper passage she quotes is a deflection of her own pain onto style, and Emre says so, and admires it. That is the self, managed coldly. It is not the self escaped.
Emre writes:
Part of growing up, too, is learning what objects in the world are worthy of our sustained attention. People are less original than they would like to think, and living is both less transcendent and less abject than most acts of narration would lead us to believe. Many of us move through life according to a relatively predictable set of rules and social codes that shape not only human behavior but also the kinds of art human beings produce to reflect their moral universe—the Bible, for instance, but also nineteenth-century novels, romantic comedies, and memoirs. This is a phenomenon that Gaitskill describes time and again as “mechanicalness,” and it grinds all manner of human interactions down into dirty shards of reality: rigid debates about sexual propriety and dating; the preoccupation with being cool; the idle chirping of social media. Since all this further alienates us from anything like a knowable or authentic self, the essayist’s ethical prerogative is to pay close and direct attention to this mechanicalness—to note its predictability, its self-absorption, its avoidance of painful reality: how it “cannot tolerate anything that is not happy and winning,” Gaitskill observes.
Nothing is ethical about the mechanical focus until you grant a creed Emre never states, and the creed is doing all the work the word “ethical” pretends to do.
Trace the buried chain. Attention to mechanicalness counts as seeing reality without illusion. Seeing without illusion counts as honesty. Honesty counts as virtue. So attending to the predictable, the self-absorbed, the bleak, becomes a moral act. Stack one more beam under it. Facing painful reality is “part of growing up,” and maturity reads as good, while consolation reads as the childish avoidance of “anything that is not happy and winning.” Truth plus pain plus maturity, and the bundle gets called ethics. But each plank is contestable, and bolting them together does not make the conclusion moral. It makes it a confession of taste. She admires the disenchanted gaze and names the admiration an ethic.
Call it the ethic of suspicion, the modern conviction that the mature act is to see through, that comfort is a lie and clear bleak sight is courage. Inside that creed, attending to mechanicalness is virtuous. Outside it, the same act looks like a refusal to honor what is in front of you. To a religious man, to a romantic, to a comic sensibility, the higher attention goes to grace, to the unrepeatable person, to joy that does not need irony to be allowed. None of those foci is less ethical. Emre treats her one stance as ethics as such, and demotes every other to evasion.
Then mark the slide that lets her say “prerogative.” She begins in aesthetics, what makes good essay material, what yields clear unsentimental prose, and ends in obligation, what the essayist ought to do. Good writing is not a moral duty. An essayist owes no more allegiance to mechanicalness than to wonder. By reaching for “ethical prerogative” she dresses a stylistic preference as a commandment, and the dignity of the word hides that no argument crossed the gap from “this makes strong prose” to “this is what you are bound to do.”
The whole thing rests on a hidden anthropology, the line that there is no “knowable or authentic self,” only codes and predictability. Grant that and the duty follows, since if persons are mostly mechanical, then attending to the machinery is attending to the truth of them. Deny it, hold that a man is irreducible, capable of real novelty, worth more than the sum of his codes, and the duty dissolves, because now there is something truer and better to attend to than his predictability.
Attention as the central moral act is a serious tradition. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) built an ethics on it in The Sovereignty of Good, and Simone Weil before her. But watch where their attention points. For Murdoch and Weil, the moral act is to attend to the full reality of another person, to see him as he is and grant him his weight, which is the opposite of grinding him into “dirty shards” and noting how predictable he is. Their attention loves the particular. Emre’s attention reduces it. She borrows the prestige of attention-as-ethics from thinkers who aimed it at the irreducible person, and turns it against him. The word ethical is carrying a creed she has not argued, lifted from a tradition that argues the other way.
Emre writes: “Their [Sontag, Didion, Arendt, and others] unsentimentality was not a personal failing, Nelson claims, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy that perceived the limits of empathy after World War II.”
The pretension in this sentence is off the charts. Start with the “not a personal failing, but a strategy” hinge. It raises an objection nobody made, that these women were merely cold by temperament, so it can knock the objection down and leave the grander reading standing. Inflation by contrast. The sentence defends the writers against a charge it invented, which lets coldness arrive already dignified.
Then count the honorifics. “Carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy.” Three dignities in a row. Carefully constructed makes it deliberate. Aesthetic and ethical claims both art and morality at once. Strategy makes it intelligent and planned. A disposition, not emoting much, gets upgraded into a considered program. That upgrade is the heart of the pretension. A trait becomes an achievement by word choice alone.
Then the grand clause, “that perceived the limits of empathy after World War II.” Here the style gets welded to the catastrophe. The camps and the bomb are summoned to lend weight to a way of writing sentences. The leap from “these women wrote without warmth” to “they perceived the limits of empathy after World War II” is enormous, and the sentence does not earn an inch of it. It borrows the gravity of the century to make a prose preference look like prophecy. And the phrase resists checking. What does perceiving the limits of empathy after the war precisely assert? Something profound-sounding that you cannot quite test. Pretension likes to live in grandeur that cannot be falsified.
Last, the bundling. Sontag, Didion, Arendt, and others are folded into one unified, intentional stance, as if four different writers signed the same manifesto. Retroactive coherence, imposed because the argument needs a school.
Deborah Nelson argues at book length in Tough Enough that unsentimentality was a chosen ethical posture for these women, and Arendt did reject the politics of the heart, in the Scholem letter Emre quotes nearby. So coldness as a considered position, rather than a defect, is a defensible thesis. The pretension is not in the idea. It is in the delivery. The sentence takes a careful, contestable argument and compresses it into a pronouncement, stacks the honorifics, drapes it in the war, and hands it to you as settled wisdom. The thought can be argued. The sentence performs.
The ending of this essay poses as a thesis and delivers a mood. The essay as a contract demanding clarity sounds neutral and is not. Who set clarity as the term of the contract? She did. Then she attributes the term to the form itself, so that her preference arrives wearing the costume of a rule everyone already signed.
The Trick
Emre’s trick is the manufactured either-or. She takes a world that is additive, plural, and governed by situation, and she splits it into two camps. Then she picks a camp, stands on it, and sells the standing as rigor. Aesthetic scrutiny or moral certification. Love or mastery. Cold or warm. Style or defunding. Surface or depth. Each is a false exclusion laid over a both-and reality. The binary is her engine. It does two jobs for her at once. It gives the world sides, which lets her be on the right one and call the other childish. And it saves her the labor of meeting each object on its own terms, because once you know which side a thing is on, you already know the verdict.
In a market flooded with confession, the scarce and conspicuous thing is the voice that refuses to confess. Value follows scarcity. When everyone is leaking feeling, the one who stays dry is the one you notice. So the anti-personal stance is not the absence of a brand. It is the strongest brand available in a confessional age. The cold tone, the compression, the severity, the verdict that brooks no disagreement, these read instantly as one person and no other. Emre created her own magnetic cult of personality. That is persona. She is a personality critic who built her name by prosecuting personality.
This is not crude hypocrisy. She does not write weepy essays and then damn them. The move is subtler. She found that in this era the most powerful form of self-assertion is the performance of self-restraint. The warm essayist says, look how complex my feelings are, and asks you to feel with her. The cold critic says, I stand above all that, and asks you to defer. The second is the louder claim, not the quieter one. It is self-display by the route of refusing self-display, and the refusal is the most flattering costume in the room, because it reads as integrity and adulthood rather than as vanity. The vanity is still there. It has only found better tailoring.
Emre defends criticism as a public-facing art against sealed academic specialization, and she builds that defense on Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, Ngai, the most hermetic and password-protected names on the shelf. The democratic word is “public.” The address is to a narrow public that already holds the codes. Public-facing here means facing her public, the readers who recognize the passwords and feel chosen by them. The language of opening the gates is a move inside the prestige economy, not a step out of it.
Her love-and-mastery formula gives the game away. Only a charged individual self produces the heat she prizes in her own prose. She says she wants to keep the love of amateur reading, the attachment and obsession and pleasure, while holding onto the mastery of the scholar. But the love pole is the very thing she condemns in the personal essayist, the attached, subjective, individual experience. She wants that intensity for herself. Her prose is described as passionate, intimate, severe all at once. The passion comes from a self that loves and judges. She has not escaped the I. She has moved it. The confessional writer puts the self in the subject. Emre puts the self in the verdict and the style. Both run on the same fuel. Hers simply sits in the judging seat, which is the higher and more powerful place to sit.
There are not two kinds of reader. There are modes any competent reader switches between as the occasion asks. A man reads the contract at his desk with all the suspicion of a scholar and reads the thriller on the plane for pure pleasure and reads to his child for love, and he is one man, switching tools to fit the job. The professor reads Derrida critically at work and falls into a novel that night with no critique at all. Mode follows purpose. Emre freezes two modes into two types of person, then announces a tension between them, then offers her synthesis as a hard-won achievement. There is no tension to resolve. The synthesis she sells is what ordinary readers already do without naming it, all day, by reading differently in different situations. She has manufactured the problem so she can be the one who solves it.
Emre’s fusion of roles, professor and editor and essayist and historian and media figure, is the expansion of one woman’s authority across every platform that exists. The confessional essayist asks to be seen. The critic does not ask. She sees, ranks, crowns, and exiles. Her relation to other writers is a relation of power, and the power runs her way. So the ego on offer is larger than the essayist’s, not smaller. The essayist wants affinity. Emre wants deference, across more domains, from a higher chair. The lineage she claims confirms it. Lionel Trilling (1905–1975), Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007), Susan Sontag (1933–2004) were not shy selves effacing themselves into the work. Sontag was a celebrity of the intellect, a personality before she was an argument. The tradition she joins is a tradition of large egos and vivid personae. There is nothing self-erasing about it.
Why can’t literature be all and more rather than just the narrow possibilities Emre posits? The answer is that all-and-more would put her out of business. Literature is an object of formal scrutiny and a vehicle for moral reflection and a source of pleasure and a record of a life and a hundred things more, often in the same book and the same reader at the same hour. The “rather than” is doing the work no evidence could do. It converts a description of the many things reading is into a choice between two, and the choice is rigged before you reach it. Emre needs the world simpler and more divided than it is.
The demystification habit is the same trick in its purest form. Her one move is to find the underlying device, the shortcut that flattens complexity into something legible, and to expose it. That is the surface-or-depth binary worn as a method. But run that move on everything and the move becomes the thing it hunts. A master key that opens every lock the same way is itself a labor-saving device. It converts the variety of the world into a single recognizable shape, the capitalist legibility-tool, so she never has to do the hard, slow, particular work of judging this object against that one. She accuses the personality test and the bestseller of being tricks that make the complex appear simple. Her demystification is a trick that makes the complex appear simple. By Ngai’s own definition, the all-purpose unmasking move reads at once as a marvel and a fraud. It is a gimmick. She is the gimmick critic with a gimmick.
Emre says the Humanities declined not only from defunding but from a failure of academic imagination and style. Watch what that does. It moves the cause from the hard structural forces, the collapse of the reading public, the cost of degrees, the labor market that turned PhDs into adjuncts, the pull of vocational majors, into a soft internal failing, a failure of style. The structural story has no hero and no cure she can sell. The internalist story has both. If bad prose killed the humanities, then good prose, criticism as a public art, critics like her, could have saved it and might yet. The myth flatters the guild and it flatters her, because it makes the remedy be the thing she happens to supply.
Now the limit. Cold and warm catches something real about Chew-Bose against Gaitskill. Suspicion is a legitimate tool. Love and mastery names two true poles of reading. The fault is never that Emre draws the line. The fault is that she forgets the line is a tool and starts treating it as a fact about the world, two camps with two kinds of people, when the truth is one person moving fluidly between modes as the situation directs. Reify the pole into a type and you get her whole method, and her whole method is the conversion of a both-and, it-depends, all-and-more world into a series of false choices she gets to win. Name the trick in four words and it is this. She splits to rule.
‘People Sorting: An Interview With ‘Personality Brokers’ Author Merve Emre’ (Sep. 17, 2018)
Emre here is warmer, more self-aware, and more generous than her polemics let on.
Look at what she did with the book. She started with a snarky Digg piece, partly fueled by a grievance, the archive that CAPT blocked, and then she sat with the women’s letters and let the sources change her. She softened the snark into biography. She says nobody wants three hundred pages of pure critique and that critique alone would answer only half the question, leaving the human desire to know oneself untouched. She drops the first person. She honors Katharine and Isabel as inventors and as mothers. That is the opposite of the one-solvent demystifier she performs elsewhere. This is a critic resisting the easy unmasking and complicating it on purpose. The detective work backs this up, finding Katharine under her maiden name Cook, paying a Melbourne student to photocopy a sympathizer’s whole archive. This is scholarship.
The blame capitalism reflex is here at full strength, pushed further than in the essays. She says only certain people under capitalism ever get the language of the self, and that to be the kind of man who has a personality you have to be the kind capitalism finds valuable.
The grounded half of this claim is solid social history. The packaged modern language of “personality,” the vocabulary of introversion and self-actualization and types, the bounded inner self you manage and develop, is recent and grew up with particular institutions, mass schooling, human-resources management, consumer marketing, the service economy, clinical psychology. Warren Susman (1927-1985) traced the shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality around 1900, and the MBTI is a pure corporate artifact, built to sort labor. So “the modern vocabulary of the self is a contingent product of modern institutions, many of them capitalist” is correct and useful.
The inflated half is the metaphysics, the claim that selfhood as such is a capitalist artifact. Sorting, hierarchy, and the hunger to know oneself are older and wider than capitalism. She takes an institutional finding and stretches it into a claim about the human self that the finding cannot bear. This slides across three different things and mashes them into one. Having an inner life, which is universal and a plain fact about human beings. Having a culturally specific vocabulary to narrate it, which is recent. And being valued by an economic system, which is contingent. A peasant in 1300 had an inner life and lacked the word introvert. A man the market discards still has subjective experience and lacks the credentialed register to narrate it in the approved key. The strong claim is true about the words and grotesque about the inner life.
Now who wins with this sort of inflated claim. The person who makes the claim wins, on several counts at once. He wins distinction, because the move signals he has read the right theory and is not naive, that he sees through the bourgeois illusion of the autonomous individual, and that signal is a password that marks membership in the demystifying class. He wins moral elevation, because locating a thing he dislikes, the therapeutic self, the confessional, individualism, inside capitalism converts his temperamental distaste into political critique, so snobbery comes out as anti-capitalism and he gets to be sophisticated and righteous in one stroke. He wins a vantage outside the system he describes, since the one who sees that the self is a construct stands, by implication, in a clarified place the duped masses cannot reach. And he wins a weapon, because if his rival’s self is only a capitalist artifact, he need not meet her writing on its merits. It is false consciousness, and he can wave it away. The coalition wins too. The claim keeps the demystifying humanities in business and gives the critic a standing job, the unmasking of constructs.
Who loses. The ordinary man whose inner life is being denied, first of all, which is the bitter irony, since the claim is made in the name of the excluded and ends by telling the excluded they have no self. Presented as a protest against exclusion, it ratifies the erasure it pretends to mourn. The system denies them selfhood slides quietly into they do not have selfhood. Truth loses, because a real narrow insight gets welded to an absurd metaphysics, and the whole package becomes easy to dismiss, so the good history is wasted. And the holder loses something too. If you believe selfhood is a fiction of capital, you have talked yourself out of an obvious reality, your own interior and everyone else’s, which is alienating and almost certainly false to your own experience the moment you stub your toe.
Why do smart people adopt something this dumb? Intelligence is not what protects against the error. It is what makes the error possible. A dull man cannot get from “personality is a twentieth-century discourse” to “you only have a self if capitalism values you,” because the trip requires the theoretical machinery, the chain of mediations, the practiced abstraction. Cleverness is the tool that builds the bridge from the true narrow claim to the false grand one. The smarter you are, the more elaborate and convincing a justification you can construct for a conclusion you hold for reasons that have nothing to do with truth. The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber makes the case that reason did not evolve to find truth but to justify ourselves to others and to win arguments, and that is the engine here. The high-powered mind is a lawyer, not a judge. It is retained to defend the conclusion, and it is good at its job.
The grand claim pays in status, membership, virtue, a seer’s vantage, a weapon against rivals, and a salary. The boring truth, that most people have inner lives, that the vocabulary is modern, that markets amplify an old human appetite for self-sorting, pays nothing. It wins no room, marks no sophistication, supplies no job. So the reward structure selects the false claim, and the smart respond to rewards like everyone else. Their intelligence does not exempt them from the incentive. It only dresses the incentive-driven belief in better tailoring.
Three things lock it in. The claim is unfalsifiable, so it is safe to hold forever. Once you accept the frame, every observation confirms it and nothing can refute it, and a position that can never be tested is comfortable to keep. The claim is the floor of the rooms these people live in, the thing serious people are assumed to believe, so doubting it marks you as naive and undertheorized and costs you status among the only people whose esteem you live on, while believing it costs you nothing you will ever be billed for. And the claim is counterintuitive, which is its own lure, because intellectual life pays a premium on the surprising and deep-sounding and pays nothing on the obvious. People have selves wins no applause. The self is a fiction of capital dazzles. The clever are drawn to the interesting-because-false over the true-because-plain, since the plain is available to everyone and confers no rank.
No one who holds this claim believes his own self is a worthless capitalist fiction. The fiction is always other people’s selves. The seer stands outside the system he dissolves, and the claim flatters him precisely by exempting him while it dissolves everyone else. A position that costs others and spares the holder is the most comfortable position there is, and the clever are very good at building them.
Emre extends empathy to the desire to be seen and reassured. She takes the quizzes, she visits the psychic eight times, she grants what is the harm in believing, she calls it a spiritual need for self-knowledge and belonging. That same need, the hunger for recognition and comfort, is the thing she prosecutes as narcissism when a woman writes a personal essay. So the need for self-recognition draws her sympathy when the woman is a private test-taker and her contempt when the woman is an essayist. The line between the two is the boundary of her own field. The civilian doing a private thing gets warmth. The rival claiming the prestige of literature gets the cold gaze. The sympathy is real, and it is withdrawn precisely where a competitor enters her turf.
Emre admires Jung’s (1875-1961) introvert, the man with a strong unyielding sense of self who will not adjust his persona to the room, who bends circumstances to his self rather than himself to circumstances, and she notes that for Jung it was always the introvert who was attractive. That is a self-portrait, and it is the bounded self she lives by. Yet a few answers later the individual self is a fiction that capitalism made available to the favored few. She wants the self to be a construct when the construct serves the critique of individualism, and a heroic given when it flatters her own type.
She rereads her teenage hostility as misrecognized class resentment, the affluent district where what passed for beauty and popularity was access to the right jeans and cars. She was the smart outsider girl who decoded the status game and saw the class beneath it. Her reflex to find the hidden structure under the surface, has a personal root in that decoding. It was her survival move before it was her method.
NYRB: ‘The Illusion of the First Person’
In Merve Emre’s essay in the Nov. 3, 2022 edition of the New York Review of Books, she claims that the individual is a fiction.
The sub-head to Emre’s essay reads: “A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.”
So there’s no individual subjective experience prior to society? What about those who grew up outside society? Did they have an inner life? Who constructs a society? Is it not individuals with subjective experiences? Do these subjective experiences shape society in addition to being shaped by society?
In his 1993 book, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939, Oxford English Literature professor John Carey wrote:
[M]odernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century educational reforms. The purpose of modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’.
Emre begins her essay with this quote by Theodor Adorno: “The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.”
Sounds like Virginia Woolf. Naturally, Emre is a Virginia Woolf scholar.
Shortly before she died, Virginia Woolf recorded this in her journal:
Wednesday, 26 February 1941. Yesterday in the ladies’ lavatory at the Sussex Grill at Brighton I heard: She’s a little simpering thing. I don’t like her. But then he never did care for big women. He has wonderful white teeth. He always had. Its fun having the boys … If he don’t look out he’ll be court martialled. They were powdering and painting, these common little tarts, while I sat, behind a thin door, p–ing as quietly as I could. Then at Fuller’s. A fat, smart woman, in red hunting cap, pearls, check skirt, consuming rich cakes. Her shabby dependent also stuffing. They ate and ate. Something scented, shoddy, parasitic about them. Where does the money come to feed these fat white slugs?
When Virginia Woolf wrote this entry in her journal, she had only a short time to live. Madness and suicide were soon to claim her. The harmless chatter she listens to with rage and loathing is curiously reminiscent of the women’s conversation that we overhear in the second part of Eliot’s The Waste Land . The topics are the same – men, teeth, the army. Even the phrasing is echoed (‘If you don’t give it him’; ‘If he don’t look out’). Perhaps she unconsciously altered what she heard, assimilating it to that great, central document of modernism.
But whether she did or not, the scene is, of course, invented. The women in Fuller’s are not ‘slugs’. ‘Common little tarts’ is an intellectual’s rewriting of the occupants of the Sussex Grill lavatory. The invention is strangely self-tormenting. Woolf imagines the women, and is infuriated by what she has imagined. Intellectual figurations of the mass are often, as we have seen, a stimulus to fury, loathing and fear. They are not comfortable things to live with, though they do afford the marginal comfort of assuring the intellectual that he or she is different.
Since intellectual phobias about the mass are, like Virginia Woolf’s, circular and self-deluding (for the ‘mass’ is invented by the intellectual whom the invention gives pain to), they seem, in extreme cases, to be a form of insanity….
An intriguing illustration of this is Rayner Heppenstall (1911–81), the friend of George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Eric Gill, Middleton Murry, etc., who worked for twenty years as a drama producer for the highbrow BBC Third Programme. Heppenstall was in many respects an archetypal early twentieth-century intellectual. He regarded himself as a failed artist, unjustly neglected by a philistine public. He had achieved brief celebrity with his first novel, The Blaze of Noon, published in 1939 – the story of a blind man who is also a Nietzsche-reader, hates the weak and disabled, scorns clerks and suburbs. But his later novels met with no comparable success, and his writing became defiantly ‘difficult’. Hélène Cixous described him as the founder of the nouveau roman. Though his BBC job assured him an ample income, he watched the dwindling proceeds of his writing resentfully. In 1973 he recorded his literary earnings as nil, calculating that the cost of stationery had exceeded his royalties.
In his journals and conversation he finds relief in élitist or racist outbursts against the welfare state, trades unions (‘enemies of civilization’), coloured immigrants, new universities and the working class. Like Nietzsche, Wells and other intellectuals, he enjoys contemplating the extinction of large sections of humanity: ‘There are a whole race, the Arabs, and a mongrel people, the Irish, upon whom, if it were possible merely by pressing a button, I would happily commit total genocide.’
Emre writes:
The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do.
Why is the personal so easy to denounce? Maybe it is only easy to denounce for people like Merve Emre. Why are structural, communal, public, critical and impersonal essays superior? Where was that established?
In Paraliterary she treats the policing of good reading as an exercise of power. Universities, psychologists, editors, and critics compete to say what counts as legitimate interpretation, and she eyes that competition with suspicion, naming it as the governance of subjectivity, the sorting of inner life into administratively usable shapes. Fine. Then in “Two Paths” she steps into the role she anatomized. She decrees what counts as a good essay, sorts living writers into the worthy and the unworthy, and delivers the verdict from the chair. The contradiction is not that she welcomes readers but restricts writers. The two activities, the sociology of reading and the judgment of writing, can sit together without strict logical conflict. The contradiction is one of reflexivity. She trains the suspicious lens on every authority over meaning except her own. When others define legitimate interpretation, that is power dressed as taste. When she does it, that is taste, plain and neutral. She is an agent of the governance she diagnoses, and she does not say so. That is the hole, and it is the same hole as before. She will not put her own standard on trial.
John Carey wrote:
It was to cater for the post-Education-Act reading public that the popular newspaper came into being. The pioneer was Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. In 1896 he launched the Daily Mail , the paper with the biggest circulation at the start of the twentieth century. Its slogan was ‘The Busy Man’s Paper’ – a hit at the idea of a leisured élite. ‘A newspaper,’ Northcliffe insisted, ‘is to be made to pay. Let it deal with what interests the mass of people.’ The principle of his new journalism was ‘giving the public what it wants’. To intellectuals, this naturally sounded ominous. Intellectuals believe in giving the public what intellectuals want; that, generally speaking, is what they mean by education.
Furthermore, the popular newspaper presented a threat, because it created an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant. By adopting sales figures as the sole criterion, journalism circumvented the traditional cultural élite. In an important sense, too, it took over the function of providing the public with fiction, thus dispensing with the need for novelists. This development hinged on the emergence, in the later nineteenth century, of what became known as the human-interest story, a kind of journalism Northcliffe encouraged. In the Daily Mail , and its rival, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express , the concept of ‘news’ was deliberately extended beyond the traditional areas of business and politics to embrace stories about the everyday life of the ordinary people. As Helen MacGill Hughes points out, this level of journalism supplied for the masses essentially the same aesthetic pleasure that literature gave to the more sophisticated, and commercialized what had previously circulated informally as a component of popular culture – in gossip, ballad and broadsheet. The question ‘What are human-interest stories for?’ observes Hughes, will have the same answer as the question ‘What are novels for?’
Among European intellectuals hostility to newspapers was widespread….
But just as the spread of literacy to the ‘masses’ impelled intellectuals in the early twentieth century to produce a mode of culture (modernism) that the masses could not enjoy, so the new availability of culture through television and other popular media has driven intellectuals to evolve an anti-popular cultural mode that can reprocess all existing culture and take it out of the reach of the majority. This mode, variously called ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘ deconstruction ’ or just ‘theory’, began in 1960s with the work of Jacques Derrida, which attracted a large body of imitators among academics and literary students eager to identify themselves as the intellectual avant-garde. To establish its anti-popular status it was necessary for ‘theory’ to define itself in opposition to the prominent features of the popular media, such as television. Foremost among these is intelligibility . Whereas television must ensure that it can be understood by a wide and not necessarily highly educated educated audience, ‘theory’ must ensure that it cannot. Partly by copying the turns of phrase and peculiar verbal usages of Derrida and other practitioners, it has managed to evolve a language that is impenetrable to most native English-speakers.
A second popular feature it has succeeded in combating is human interest. A factor in television’s breadth of appeal is its focus on personality. In its cultural coverage this generally takes the form of interviews with writers, actors or directors, and programmes about authors’ and artists’ biographies. ‘Theory’, on the other hand, dismisses such biographical approaches as trivial and irrelevant. It denies that there is any ascertainable connection between authors or artists and the meaning of the works they produce. In these respects, ‘theory’ is in accord with early twentieth-century aesthetic treatises such as Clive Bell’s Art and Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art , which taught, as we have seen, that only people incapable of aesthetic emotion look for human interest and other such ‘ sentimental irrelevancies’ in artistic works, and that ‘the passion and pain of the man behind the poet’ is the province of the degenerate masses, not the specially gifted minority. ‘Theory’ (which, it is no surprise to find, often makes obeisance to Nietzsche) teaches that art and literature are ‘self-referential’ or ‘self-reflexive’ – that is, they have no relevance at all to the real world or to the life ordinary people lead. This viewpoint is, again, perfectly in accord with the Bloomsbury aesthetes’ horror of the ‘photographic’ realism that the ‘gross herd’ clamours for – a horror which led Clive Bell, for example, to disdain seventeenth-century Dutch art as a collection of ‘ chromo-photographs ’.
Roland Barthes, whose essay ‘The Death of the Author’ is generally regarded as a landmark in the late twentieth-century dehumanization of literature, shows other affinities with the old-style intellectuals. In The Pleasure of the Text he urges his disciples ‘to be aristocratic readers’ (Barthes’s emphasis).
Here are Merve Emre’s second and third paragraphs:
What makes essays that tell stories about people bad? For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, one of the essayists Adorno most admired, essays about people betray the true object of essayistic criticism: the private individual. The private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre that story may be. The private individual is not a proper name—not “Virginia Woolf” or “Elizabeth Hardwick,” not “Joan Didion” or “Zadie Smith” or whoever it is you consider your favorite personal essayist to be. Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity.
Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. Yet having marveled at its aesthetic flexibility and freedom, few critics put this claim through its paces. What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?
Nobody claims that a proper name is the sum of the individual. The name stands for a person. “Joan Didion” was a particular human being who chose her sentences. The idea did not write the essays. The woman did. Emre has inverted the order of reality. The persons are real, and “the private individual” is the abstraction we form by generalizing across them. She treats the abstraction as the real thing and the people as mere instances of it, which is backward. The universal is derived from the particulars. She has made the particulars derivative of the universal, and then, two steps later, she calls the universal a lie. The persons get demoted twice, once to instances, once to instances of a fiction.
There is no idea that animates these four. Woolf’s mysticism, Didion’s dread, Hardwick’s cool irony, and Zadie Smith’s (b. 1975) sociability share nothing past the bare grammar of the first person. “The private individual” is not a concept she found running through them. It is a label she drops over four heads to make a bloc she can then prosecute. The unity is manufactured by the abstraction.
Note also the deference. “For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin.” She credits the move to them as if it were settled, when treating “the private individual” as the true object of essay criticism is a particular Frankfurt School commitment, not a neutral account of what essays are about. She borrows their authority to license the swap.
Studying “the individual” as a historical category is real work. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) did it with the author function, Mauss (1872-1950) with the category of the person, and the personal essay does rest on a culturally formed idea of the bounded expressive self that has a history worth tracing. The legitimate version of Emre’s argument says the genre presupposes a certain notion of selfhood. The illegitimate version, hers, reifies that notion into something more real than the men and women themselves, pretends one idea animates writers who have nothing in common, and uses the concept as a bridge to declaring the persons’ inner lives fictional.
She trades the particular she cannot kill for the universal she can, manufactures the universal’s unity, then kills it, and leaves the living writers standing as instances of a fiction.
Emre claims that individual subjectivity is “a lie,” an artifact of bourgeois property relations dated by Benjamin to the reign of Louis Philippe. She treats this as a finding. It is a position. Marx (1818-1883), Adorno (1003-1969), Althusser (1918-1990), and Benjamin (1892-1940) held it, and they argued for it against opponents who held otherwise. Citing four men who agree does not settle the question. So when she asks her string of rhetorical questions, “what if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the I,” the answer she wants is already loaded into the frame she brought. The essay never tests the claim. It decorates it.
The essay refutes itself. She writes under her own name. Her case rests on the prose of Woolf, Hardwick, and Didion, and she clearly loves describing what makes each of them singular: Woolf’s paired adverbs, Hardwick trebling her adjectives, Didion’s missing antecedent that drops you mid-scene. You cannot read those paragraphs and believe their authors are interchangeable products of property relations. Emre’s own taste keeps insisting on the very individuality her theory says is a phantom. The style is the rebuttal, sitting inside the argument, unanswered.
So what is the essay doing? Partly it is a taste argument wearing structural clothes. Emre prefers the impersonal, the mediated, the friendship-through-style of the familiar essay, and she dislikes the confessional pile-up of trauma as content. Fair. The Vannoy parody she quotes makes the case better than the theory does, because it shows content crowding out style until the writers are named by subgenre rather than by name. That is a real loss and you do not need Benjamin to mourn it. The Marxist apparatus gives the preference a grander costume than it requires.
Emre writes: “Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction.”
You know what else are artful constructions? The New York Review of Books. The New Yorker. Emre’s books. The pyramids. The Great Wall of China. Chichén Itzá. Petra. Machu Picchu. The Christ the Redeemer statute in Rio De Janeiro. The Colosseum in Rome. The Taj Mahal in India.
Emre continues: “Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers.”
What is worthless about a subject that flickers?
Merve Emre begins her fifth paragraph: “Once labor had been cordoned off from life, once the productive activity of work had been extricated from the supposedly unproductive experience of dwelling, the private individual was born.”
Labor has never been cordoned off from life. Many of our closest bonds are formed at work. Some people look forward to going to work to see people they love and to take on challenges they find stimulating. We have always had times for getting and times for being and sometimes these times are not cordoned off but run together. This not an invention of capitalism. Emre argues the individual was only born in the 19th Century. That would come as news to the billions of people who lived before then. Just because you identify with a group does not mean that you don’t also have an individual identity.
Emre: “He was, quite naturally, blind to his own history as a derivative creature, an artifact of political and economic processes that he had little incentive to question.”
We’re all blind, not just to political and economic processes, but to a whole host of things that we may have little incentive to question. We all believe what is convenient. There are many non-rational beliefs that serve us, such as an exaggerated view of our own significance. We’re all derivative creatures and simultaneously, many of us have original, first, basic and primary qualities. Nobody springs out of the ground. We all derive from others and in turn, others derive from us. Humans have had blind spots from time immemorial. Nobody has ever been all-knowing. So therefore because people have blind spots, they have no first-person subjective experience of value? Why?
Emre: “The domestic sphere was his incubator, his sanctuary from commercial and social considerations.”
Do you know what else is an incubator? A church. A coffee shop. A yoga studio. A school. A club.
Many people work from home and experience the domestic and the productive flowing together. While changing his child’s diaper, a man may receive insights into his work and immediately transition to his job.
Emre: “There he could retreat, wide-eyed and mewling, to probe what he believed to be his thoughts, lodged in his self, his mind, his body, and his home.”
Is Emre exempt from this description? Or is it only the masses who retreat, wide-eyed and mewling? When Paul, Mohammed and Nietzsche retreated from the world, did they have original thoughts?
Emre continues:
“The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions,” Benjamin wrote, explaining how the ownership of property mirrored the ownership of subjectivity. He continued, “From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe.”
So is it only people in offices who deal in reality while people at home deal in illusion?
Most people I know are able to combine subjective experiences with awareness of things outside.
Emre: “For Benjamin, the best representative of the private individual was the collector of decorative objects, “the true resident of the interior” as an architectural and an existential space.”
So the private individual who loves his wife and his children, and enjoys having his friends over to his home for dinner, he only collects objects?
Emre: “For us, it might be the personal essay collection, which props up the same ideology.”
What ideology is that? The ideology that we need other people?
There’s no strict dividing line between texting a friend, chatting with a stranger at a grocery store, and writing a first-person essay. I find these things flow together.
Emre: “The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.”
If I write an essay telling you that I feel small in a big world, that does not mean I am ignorant of the role that society plays in my feelings. I might just want to share one thing in my life without the burden of examining all things. An essay doesn’t have to do everything to have merit. LeBron James is not a lesser person because he’s not a great poet. The movie director isn’t a piece of crap because he can’t do linear algebra. The psychologist is not worthless because he’s not conversant in particle physics.
Emre: “The personal essay appears as the purest, most unflinching aesthetic expression of the lie, for the simple reason that, for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place, the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed, “implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity,” Adorno wrote.”
So if I publish an essay about one spectator’s experience of a presidential inauguration, I assume the lie that this individual’s experience is more important than everything else that happened on that occasion? Why? Maybe I just want to tell one person’s story without making any claims to its primacy over other experiences.
Is it possible to publish something about your life without claiming that your life must have priority over everything else in the universe?
Emre:
By my account, the personal essay is a modern formation. It is a wholly different creature from the essay birthed by Montaigne in 1570 and nurtured through the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham Cowley. Each of these essayists is unwilling to disentangle the individual from the condition of man or nature, a commitment reflected by how their prose slides with graceful abandon through the various third-person singulars. The “I” with and of which the modern personal essay speaks proclaims its distinctiveness from the “we” that crowds the eighteenth-century periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, as well as the “they” that throngs the nineteenth-century metaphysical disquisitions of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt.
Her periodization is partly right, her metaphysics and her values are the rot.
Emre:
“No one has approached the essays of Elia,” writes Virginia Woolf in “The Decay of Essay-Writing.” Published nearly a quarter-century before Benjamin began his Arcades Project and a half-century before Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” Woolf’s lament about the aesthetic decline of the personal essay grasps the problem of telling stories about people not head-on but obliquely. She opens not by offering a history of bourgeois individualism but by decrying its most obvious institutional manifestations: first, “the spread of education,” and second, the proliferation of print culture. The churn of both schools and presses results, ultimately, in the flattening of much written matter, Woolf complains, and in a feeling of oversaturation, of boredom on the part of the reader who bears the onslaught. But the reader’s boredom is not the boredom one feels when confronted with an apparently infinite, depersonalized expanse of writing—the boredom of slogging through tightly packed columns in a nineteenth-century periodical, for instance. Rather, it is the boredom of having to attend to “a very large number” of people, all of whom demand public recognition through the projection of a private interiority.
Boredom is a subjective experience. It is not a divine revelation. What Woolf finds boring may be enthralling to another person.
When one feels that one must attend to a “very large number” of people demanding public recognition, that is a disorder. It makes no evolutionary sense.
No matter the number of first-person essays published, nobody is forced to attend to them just as nobody is forced to pay attention to the publication of new college textbooks or the release of new shows on Netflix.
Emre:
The intimate connection between education, the bourgeois public sphere, and the specter of private individuality compels Woolf to judge the personal essay “a sign of the times.” It is the genre whose formal conventions—the “capital I” of “I think” or “I feel”—not only draw the individual into public view, but also insist upon the primacy of the individual. This insistence occurs regardless of the quality of the essayist’s prose. The personal essay’s significance “lies not so much in the fact that we have attained any brilliant success in essay-writing…but in the undoubted facility with which we write essays as though this were beyond all others our natural way of speaking,” with the “amiable garrulity of the tea-table,” Woolf writes. It is “primarily an expression of personal opinion,” with the stress falling on the “personal,” one’s “individual likes and dislikes,” rather than the strength or the stylishness of the opinion expressed. While these individual likes and dislikes certainly add up to a large “number,” a word that Woolf repeats with scornful amazement, they do not combine in any sensible way. They cannot be imagined as a mass, a totality, cannot be integrated and set to any collective social or political purpose.
Notice the inability of Woolf and Emre to mount a case against the potential value of first-person essays. All they can do is point and sputter against straw men.
Writing a first-person essay does not insist on the primacy of the individual any more than if I watch an hour of football, I am insisting on the primacy of the NFL over every other part of life. I love the Dallas Cowboys. It has never occurred to me that everybody else should love this team. I vote Republican every time, but it has never occurred to me that other parties will never be more right than my own. I might choose to eat chocolate cake for breakfast on Monday without insisting that this is the primary way for everybody to eat breakfast every day. I can love my woman without insisting that everybody else love her.
The appetite for easy narratives, simple categories, and self-flattering types is human and old. Astrology, the four humors, caste, totem, proverb, gossip, the morality play, the saint’s life, all are sorting systems that flatten complexity into something a man can carry around, and all predate capitalism by millennia. The taste for the easy is anthropological. It belongs to the species, not to an economic order. When Emre codes legibility and accessibility and reassurance as the signature of late capitalism and managerial culture, she takes a constant of human nature and pins it on a recent system she dislikes. That move makes the system look more sinister and more reversible than it is. And it empties the word capitalism of any explanatory force, because if every order rewards the easy, then “this order rewards the easy” tells you nothing. The word does no work. It is there to assign blame, not to explain.
The same man wants the hard thing and the easy thing at different hours, and neither cancels the other. I watch the NFL and I read difficult books. Wanting the easy does not make me a dupe of managerial culture, and it does not crowd out the hard. Emre’s frame flattens the many appetites of one person into a single symptom, as if the desire for reassurance were a disease the system installed rather than a normal part of a full life. People are mixed, and they always were. It has nothing to do with capitalism.
Emre:
Woolf did not hold the desire for recognition to be unethical or untoward, nor did she believe that collective representation is the only purpose to which the essay ought to be directed. Rather, the essay had to maintain the contradictions between individual desires and social demands, between personal being and impersonal experience, to grant the form its unique ability to capture the texture of life—not a particular life, but the impersonal activity of living. “The Decay of Essay-Writing” thus concludes with two visions of potential essays, the first permissible, according to Woolf, the second unacceptable. “To say simply ‘I have a garden, and I will tell you what plants do best in my garden’ possibly justified its egoism,” Woolf writes; “but to say “I have no sons, though I have six daughters, all unmarried, but I will tell you how I should have brought up my sons had I had any” is not interesting, cannot be useful, and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the art of penmanship and then the invention of essay-writing are responsible.”
The tacit hope is that one day, the essay may be blocked from circulating stories about private, homebound people into the wider world…
Framed by teachers of writing as “conversational” and “chatty,” characterized by its air of “spontaneity,” the essay suggested the author’s “personality” as a specular structure. Its refusal to subject the writer to direct observation was an integral part of its signature.”
Some first-person essays suggest the author’s personality is spectacular while other first-person essays reveal the author’s shame. That I am writing in the first-person does not mean I can’t open up this post up to direct observations from other parties. If you’ve got a good observation, I’ll stick it right here. Email me.
Emre:
By contrast, the personal essay distinguished itself from the beginning by its failure to maintain the practice of triangulation between the essayist, her reader, and the object that shared their attention—its unwillingness to commit to inadvertency. It indulged the temptation to “fall into monologue,” Morley complained, allowing its language to curdle into disclosures that were “too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately ‘whimsical’ (the word which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic).”
So the only way to write a first-person essay is to triangulate between the essayist, the reader and the object? Why?
None of the claims in Emre’s paragraph stand up to examination.
God forbid some author should fall into monologue! What have monologues ever contributed to the world?
Emre:
As many of the composition textbooks from the early twentieth century recognized, direct address could not be avoided entirely: it was inherent in the use of the first person. Yet its influence on essay writing and reading could be minimized, made to harmonize with competing forms of address that were more depersonalized in the kind of friendship they imagined—indeed, that held impersonality to be a sign of the essay’s aesthetic and ethical success.
So where is it in written in the heavens that the impersonal is always better than the personal?
Emre:
Why are people attracted to stories about individuals? The answer is as obvious as it is petty and perhaps cynical. The fiction of private individuality projected by the personal essay allows bourgeois subjects to accrue various economic, cultural, and social rewards. These rewards are dispersed by institutions that are both constituted by the fiction of the private individual and responsible for reproducing it. The most obvious institution of this kind is the school and, as Adorno observes, its elevation of “pedagogical necessity” into “a metaphysical virtue.” Once the production of personhood becomes bound to and administered by pedagogy, its illusions gain in intensity and reach, as does the personal essay.
I grant that the first-person essay is a genre filled with illusions. Now please name me a genre not filled with illusions.
Emre writes:
The first mention of the personal essay as an admissions requirement, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), came during Harvard’s drastic changes to its admissions practices in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, selection based on exam scores had created what administrators called a “Jewish problem”: the admission of more Jewish applicants than the university deemed acceptable. “We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admission examination,” wrote Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1922, advocating for a subjective set of criteria. The other qualifications he listed, “character” and “leadership,” were to be assessed through three new genres, as Karabel writes: “Demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities.” The assumption was that Jewish applicants would fall short of the school’s desired “character standard”—that their “centuries of oppression and degradation” meant that they were characterized not by a commitment to individual and personal self-assertion but by a “martyr air.”
To weed out Jewish applicants, universities mobilized the essay as an heir to the Catholic tradition of confession and the later Protestant tradition of narratives of “saving faith,” notes the historian Charles Petersen in his dissertation on meritocracy. No doubt the version of individualism championed by administrators drew on the moral culture of the Protestant bourgeoisie, what Max Weber described as its use of education to cultivate a rational, self-assertive personality. This type was marked by its ability to adhere to a consistent and subjective set of values in a disenchanted world. Forced to conceive the meaning of things, and even man’s relationship to reality, as an individual matter, Weber’s rational personality type formed intellectual arrangements to anoint himself the master and the arbiter of his own destiny, and eventually the destinies of those around him.
The premise of elite college admissions was that this relation could be cinched, and indeed enhanced, by reversing its terms: that the ability to demonstrate, through the genre of the essay, one’s commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism marked the applicant as someone well-suited to higher education. Whereas in previous centuries, higher education would have secured a career in the ministry, now it led to executive roles in industry and government. Beyond its discriminatory function, the personal essay sought to identify the students whom the university could transform into the political and economic leaders of the future. Learning how to “game the system” was only a sign of the system’s success at shaping applicants’ behavior.
The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay—and the college application process in general—places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever. Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), write:
Applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: “failure,” an expert on the admissions essay tells us, “is essayistic gold.”
Far from signaling weakness, the proud narration of failure speaks of character in precisely the terms set by the educated bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century: character as the capacity to maintain one’s self-comportment in a moment of distress, to tell a tale of hardship lit by the glow of self-knowledge.
So people and institutions look for ways to get what they want. How does that damn the personal essay?
If the personal essay was used to bad ends, then it joins everything else in creation.
You can drink too much water. You can kill people while driving a car. So because drinking and driving can be abused, we should never drink water or drive a car?
Emre:
Perceived by many critics as a rejoinder to New Critical ideologies of reading, the confessional generation appeared to turn away from the university, where the modernist idea that a work exists independently of its creator had been institutionalized. The confessional school, by contrast, squatted at the nexus of therapeutic culture, with its air of psychological self-seriousness; second-wave feminism, from which it drew its reputation as a genre of female complaint; and 1960s counterculture, which imagined literary production as a loose and spontaneous activity.
All work is created or curated by individuals.
Emre: “While one could read individual essay collections to trace how the market emboldened the aesthetics of confession, parody presents a more fruitful opportunity for understanding the personal essay’s evolving commercial function through the 1990s and 2000s.”
Why?
Emre: “Whereas the narrator of a personal essay draws our attention to the experience of a single individual, the Personal Essay Vannoy ventriloquizes channels the genre’s conceptual production of personhood as a salable commodity.”
Drawing “attention to the experience of a single individual” may shed light on the under-valued experience of millions. From the particular, we often get a profound sense of the whole. A lab need only draw a vial of my blood to get important insights. It’s not the size of the blood draw that matters, it is the quality of the information derived from the blood. So too with the first-person essay. It is not the focus or the voice of the essay that matters most, it is the importance of what it reveals.
There is no shortcut to assessing merit.
Emre:
The rise of confessional writing authorized new groups to speak as individuals, amplifying the voice of the “voiceless” in testimonies to dispossession. Yet as Cheryl Butler argues in The Art of the Black Essay (2003), the essays of James Baldwin, Rebecca Walker, and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates are only awkwardly aligned with the tradition of the personal essay. Even if personal experience is what authorizes the essay form, its function as “a weapon for the downtrodden and the desperate-to-be-heard” presumes that personhood was, from the outset, an unequally distributed resource. Nowhere is this more evident than in Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” in which he examines himself from the self-estranged perspective of the white Swiss villagers who rub his skin and touch his hair, astounded by his blackness: “There was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”
She moves fast past Baldwin (1924-1987) and the question of who gets to say “I” at all. Cheryl Butler’s point, that personhood was an unequally distributed resource, cuts against Emre’s thesis. If saying “I” is a restricted political achievement that some had to fight for, then the “I” is not only an ideological trap. For some writers it was a weapon. Emre notes this and then walks away from it, because it does not fit the story where the first person is the lie of the bourgeoisie. The essay is more honest in that paragraph than anywhere else, and it does not follow the thread.
Emre:
This production takes place through a competitive practice of disclosure, a game of one-upmanship that promises access to publishing’s networks of mentorship, distribution, and circulation. And the conventions of confession, the shocking clichés that the personal essays in the clinic must mobilize to perform their singular and embodied personhood, depend so much on their content that they short-circuit any consideration of individual style on the part of either reader or writer. We have no idea how these essays are written; we only know what they are about. We see this in the naming of the personal essays at the clinic—not by the readability of the proper name, but by subgenre, a categorical descriptor that could belong to any number of individuals. (Certainly, more than one essayist has written on divorce.) One could imagine the clinic filling up with an infinitely receding horizon of subgenres that, for all their startling combinations, never get any closer to grounding the essay in the peculiarities of prose. The tension between personality and impersonality, essential to early understanding of the familiar essay, has gone slack, bloated by traumatic content.
That a genre has conventions does not invalidate the genre. What does “grounding the essay in the peculiarities of prose” mean? Is there any way to write an essay without prose?
Emre might build a stronger case if she quoted from the acclaimed first-person essays of the past two decades and showed how they were excrement. But then she’d have to make her case against something concrete.
Emre:
Under what conditions is content king? When the personal essay makes the production of personhood not only publicly legible but also monetizable. “Secretly…we each hoped to out-devastate the other and nail ourselves a freelance contract,” confesses Vannoy’s Personal Essay. Her confession is comic, cruel, and pathetic, revealing the mismatch between out-devastating another person through self-exposure and the rewards it yields. In a publishing industry that has largely done away with staff writers, an industry in which art and literature have dwindled into minor cultural forms and creative laborers must maintain appealing online personae to crowdfund their livelihoods, few things could be more coveted than a “freelance contract.” If there is something painfully anachronistic about buying every copy of Marie Claire, then there is something equally painful in the recognition that the Personal Essay’s performance of personhood only gives her access to exploitative labor conditions. But this is as good as it gets.
I put the phrase “content is king” into Google and chose the “meaning” search. I found: “The quote “content is king” is very often used in conjunction with content marketing and SEO. It implies that unique, high-quality, interesting and relevant content contributes significantly to the success of companies on the Internet.”
So there’s your answer, Emre.
Nobody, aside from students, is forced to write first-person essays. If one chooses to do so, it is hard to argue that one is “exploited.”
Emre: “The Personal Essay’s appraisal of the economic situation reveals why the triangulation of reader, writer, and object secured by the familiar essay is no longer possible. Fewer places will pay for it; fewer people are trained to produce it.”
Concern for the reader combined with an interest in the object does not require a graduate school education. Even a longshoreman can do it.
Emre: “The confessional has proved a highly successful strategy for extracting literary production from an increasingly deskilled workforce that needs to do little more than share experiences.”
And what is the evidence the workforce is increasingly deskilled?
Emre laments “the precarious conditions under which creative labor is performed.” How about the precarious conditions under which non-creative labor is performed?
Life is precarious. We can sometimes make it more or less precarious by our choices. The power of collective choice to change conditions does not invalidate the power of personal choice to change conditions. The individual and his society do not live on separate planets.
Emre: “What we ought to mourn, then, is not the decline of the personal essay; its ethos and its aesthetics persist. Rather, it is the much longer, slower death of the conditions that gave rise to the essay’s unintimate friendship, a familiarity mediated not by a spectacular personhood but by the skillful cultivation of style.”
There are spectacular personhoods and sometimes these are more important than the skillful cultivation of style.
In 2021, Emre, then an associate professor at Oxford, delivered a talk titled “The Impersonal Essay” to the Oxford Centre for Life Writing.
When it suits her, Merve Emre enlists Virginia Woolf in her complaints about the first-person essay, but Emre ignores when Woolf argues for the superiority of writing that is interior and subjective. As the American Interest noted in 2018:
[Tom] Wolfe [took] an approach to fiction that Virginia Woolf disdained in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (too much attention to characters’ external circumstances, she said of Arnold Bennett, and not enough focus on the interior workings of their minds) and burlesqued it into the stratosphere.
People like Virginia Woolf were all for exploring the interior subjective experiences so long as it was only done by professionals.
Do you have a license for that memoir, prole?
Some first-person narratives are prized by professors and some are not. If you’re black and you’ve got AIDS, for example, the intellectual class wants to hear about your experience. If you’re a white man who clings to guns and religion and people like himself, not so much.
Why did Michael Cunningham's novel, “The Hours,” win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award while Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full win nothing? As the Wall Street Journal noted in 1999:
The answer is, of course, that they [the judges] were thinking how exquisite and professional “The Hours” is. This was the stick John Updike used to beat Tom Wolfe in a New Yorker review that probably cost “A Man in Full” any literary prize. Producing what “amounts to entertainment, not literature,” Mr. Wolfe had “failed to be exquisite,” Mr. Updike pronounced.
Even Norman Mailer complained in the New York Review of Books about the author’s unprofessionalism. The journalist Wolfe never acquired “those novelistic habits that are best learned when we are young” and thus lacks “the most important and noble purpose of a novelist.”
Tom Wolfe may have invited such attacks. Back in the mid-1960s, he mocked Mr. Updike’s “thatchy medieval haircut” and dubbed Mr. Updike’s New Yorker “the most successful suburban women’s magazine in the country.” And then, in 1989, after the success of “Bonfire of the Vanities,” he took to the pages of Harper’s with a “manifesto for the new social novel.” In our “weak, pale, tabescent moment,” he argued, there’s no one doing what Dickens, Balzac and Zola did. We have lots of talented writers, but the “American novel is dying of anorexia” because they won’t go out and report on anything other than themselves.
But Mr. Wolfe, in fact, was only partly right. He saw a thousand heirs to John Updike, all possessing a professional prose so finely honed that it seemed capable of cutting to the heart of almost anything. And he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t use it for anything important.
He missed, however, the extent to which a particular prose style requires a particular sensibility. It’s as though our authors have all been forced to absorb something as exquisite as, say, Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a book of semi-mystical nature-observation that has been mandatory at writers’ workshops for years. And once a writer’s been anniedillardated, the prose gets finer and finer, and the point gets smaller and smaller.
Mr. Updike hasn’t had to pay much penalty for his prose, and even Ms. Dillard occasionally says something interesting. But their children have all been ruined. They write like angels, of course; indeed, they are angels, so disembodied that an infinite number of them can dance on the head of a pin. Even while she’s denouncing capitalist America, Pulitzer runner-up Barbara Kingsolver sounds like an ethereal dove, gently expiring from consumption. Alice Munro — whose “The Love of a Good Woman” won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award — has a prose so fine it can’t lift anything heavier than a small cup of tea. There’s a description of a china cupboard in her story “Cortes Island” so profoundly pointless it has to be seen to be believed.
And Michael Cunningham? When first reached with the news of his Pulitzer, he announced that he was going to sit down and “have a good cry.” His readers might have guessed as much. In truth, Mr. Cunningham’s “The Hours” deserves its prizes. Its exquisiteness is measured by such passages as: “But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another.”
And its professionalism is measured by its simultaneous use of all three of the tricks by which our angelic writers cobble up the appearance of a subject on which to shower their perfect prose. With Virginia Woolf’s suicide, Mr. Cunningham has found the mock gravity of historical tragedy. With his jumbled narrative, he’s indulged the faux sophistication of a literary puzzle that Michael Ondaatje worked up for “The English Patient.” And with his recasting of “Mrs. Dalloway,” he’s discovered the pretend literary density derived nowadays from retelling everything from Dickens’s “Great Expectations” to Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
With all this going for it, who wouldn’t pass up Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” to give Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” a Pulitzer? The prize novels of America ought to come with a warning: The author you’re about to read is a professional. Don’t try this at home.
Wikipedia has an entry on literary feuds, and includes this:
Arnold Bennett wrote an article called “Is the Novel Decaying?” in 1923 in which, as an example, he criticized Virginia Woolf’s characterizations in Jacob’s Room. Woolf responded with “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in the Nation and Athenaeum. In her piece, Woolf misquoted Bennett’s article and displayed ill temper. She then significantly rewrote “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” “to ridicule, patronize, and actually distort Bennett’s writing without raising her voice.”
Though he didn’t respond immediately, Bennett later began an anti-Woolf campaign in a weekly column in the Evening Standard, giving negative reviews of three of Woolf’s novels. His reviews continued the attack on Woolf’s characterizations, saying “Mrs. Woolf (in my opinion) told us ten thousand things about Mrs. Dalloway, but did not show us Mrs. Dalloway.” His essay “The Progress of the Novel” for the journal The Realist was a refutation of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. Of Woolf, he says “”I regard her alleged form as the absence of form, and her psychology as an uncoordinated mass of interesting details, none of which is truly original.”
Although the two writers met socially and acted with civility, each recorded the meetings harshly in their respective journals. On Bennett’s death, Woolf wrote in her diary, “”Queer how one regrets the dispersal of anybody who seemed—as I say—genuine; who had direct contact with life—for he abused me; and I yet rather wished him to go on abusing me; and me abusing him.”
John Carey wrote:
Arnold Bennett is the hero of this book. His writings represent a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses. He has never been popular with intellectuals as a result. Despite Margaret Drabble’s forceful advocacy, his novels are still undervalued by literary academics, syllabus-devisers and other official censors. Many students of English literature know of him, if at all, only through Virginia Woolf’s scornful estimate in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, and they naturally, though mistakenly, assume that Bennett, not Woolf, is diminished by that sally.
Bennett’s origins and upbringing provided easy targets for the intellectuals’ disdain. He came from the provincial shopkeeping class…
Later, when he had made his mark as a novelist, these humble antecedents were not forgotten by the intellectuals. He was ‘an insignificant little man and ridiculous to boot,’ declared Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, the art critic Clive Bell. ‘He was the boy from Staffordshire who was making good, and in his bowler hat and reach-me-downs he looked the part.’ According to Somerset Maugham , Bennett looked like ‘a managing clerk in a city office’, and was ‘rather common’. Wyndham Lewis sneered at his ‘grocer origins’; Virginia Woolf at his ‘shopkeeper’s view of literature’. Bertrand Russell found him so ‘vulgar’ that he could not bear to be in the same room. T. S. Eliot told his cousin in a letter of 1917 how annoyed he had been when he was discussing psychic research with W. B. Yeats and a red-faced man ‘with an air of impertinent prosperity and the aspect of a successful wholesale grocer’ came up and interrupted them, in ‘a most disagreeable cockney accent’. This, he discovered, was Arnold Bennett. It particularly aroused the intellectuals’ venom that Bennett should have presumed to make money from literature, as they could not. D. H. Lawrence described him to Aldous Huxley as a ‘sort of pig in clover’, and Ezra Pound satirized him as the corrupt, venal and philistine Mr Nixon, pontificating in the ‘cream and gilded cabin of his steam yacht’.
Tom Wolfe said, “I think the real future is non-fiction. Memoirs never die.”
In his 1989 essay for Harpers, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, Wolfe wrote:
The young person who decides to become a writer because he has a subject or an issue in mind, because he has “something to say,” is a rare bird. Most make that decision because they realize they have a certain musical facility with words. Since poetry is the music of language, outstanding young poets are by no means rare. As he grows older, however, our young genius keeps running into this damnable problem of material, of what to write about, since by now he realizes that literature’s main arena is prose, whether in fiction or the essay. Even so, he keeps things in proportion. He tells himself that 95 percent of literary genius is the unique talent that is secure inside some sort of crucible in his skull and 5 percent is the material, the clay his talent will mold…
I doubt that there is a writer over forty who does not realize in his heart of hearts that literary genius, in prose, consists of proportions more on the order of 65 percent material and 35 percent the talent in the sacred crucible.
‘The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters’ (The New Yorker, July 25, 2022)
Merve Emre writes this piece as a Gerald Murnane (b. 1939) imitation. The opening scene with the watching woman and the writing man does what his narrators do: it speculates, it qualifies, it grants its subject possibilities his life might not contain. Then her husband points out that the man is watching television. That punchline is the essay's best moment because it admits the fraud of the projection while honoring what made the projection possible.
She cannot sustain the trick. Once Emre shifts to biography and exposition, the frame drops and we get standard The New Yorker appreciation prose. The piece becomes about Murnane rather than enacting him.
What Emre gets right: she treats Murnane as a technical writer, which is what he calls himself. She emphasizes grammar, the subjunctive mood, the conditional tense, the alternation of long and short sentences, the avoidance of proper names. She quotes him on Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) on rhythm. She gives Ann Banfield her due on "unspeakable sentences." These are the right tools for reading him.
She avoids the mysticism trap, mostly. She calls him an assured craftsman and a workhorse, refusing the genius label.
What she fudges: the women. Murnane has fallen in love with several hundred women he never spoke to, and he writes for them. Emre acknowledges this and calls it "benevolent voyeurism," then moves on fast. That phrase does a lot of work to obscure something worth examining. A man who builds his lifetime project on silent surveillance of women he refuses to address has a relationship to other people worth probing. Emre is too polite to probe.
She also will not push on the question of whether fifteen books circling the same images and methods constitutes a major body of work or a long act of self-replication. The comparisons to Marcel Proust (1871-1922), W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940), Jon Fosse (b. 1959), and Rachel Cusk (b. 1967) function as ranking by association rather than argument. None of those writers built a career on the same handful of motifs the way Murnane does. The question of his limits is real and Emre will not ask it.
Her ending tilts into sentimentality Murnane himself might resist. "Holier than any relationship between flesh-and-blood creatures" is the sentence he edits out. He is drier than his interpreter wants him to be. The image of colored glass shards lit from within reads as her flourish, not his.
The essay's hidden argument: Murnane is a writer who teaches readers how to read him, and the proper response is to read him as he wants to be read. Emre adopts his categories. Personages. True fiction. The Ideal Reader. She does not test those categories from outside. She becomes one of his readers writing back to him in his own language. Generous, and a limit on the criticism.
The headline "Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters" does the romanticizing the essay then half-disclaims. The New Yorker house style requires a certain solemnity about literary outsiders. Emre works within that and against it at the same time, with mixed results.
One last note. The Murnane photograph she describes shows the scowling old man with one hand holding the other in his lap. She speculates about what he might be scowling at. That move is the essay in miniature. She wants to write him as a personage even as she reports him as a fact. The tension between those impulses gives the piece its interest and marks its limit.
‘Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?’ (The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2023)
Emre writes well. John Guillory (b. 1947) has produced a useful book, Professing Criticism. But the review and the book share a problem that neither faces head on.
The diagnosis is right. Literary criticism became a profession. The profession secured autonomy and lost the audience. Scholars address each other in a private language. The work has no purchase outside the seminar room. Guillory sees this. Emre sees this. They both flinch from the consequence.
The consequence: the discipline might die, and the world will lose little of importance.
Emre lists the scholar-activist as one phase among many, the third moment after the philologist and the Scholar-Critic. She then moves on. But this phase has eaten the field. The political surrogacy Guillory names as a pathology is the daily practice of most literature departments. Open a recent issue of PMLA or Critical Inquiry. You will read about race, gender, colonialism, the Anthropocene, surveillance, neoliberalism. You will read little about how the poem works.
No outsider wants to read it. The lay reader who picks up a novel and feels something does not need a professor to tell him the novel reproduces colonial logics. He wanted to know if the book was any good. He wanted help thinking about why it moved him. The profession abandoned that work decades ago.
Guillory's five rationales for literary study attempt to climb back to a position the profession has already vacated. The aesthetic-critical rationale is the only one with teeth. The others are alibis. Linguistic and cognitive development happens in many disciplines. Moral and judicial instruction is what the church and the family once did. National and cultural formation is a project that contemporary literary studies opposes. The epistemic-disciplinary rationale amounts to the profession defending itself.
Emre quotes Guillory's strongest line: the discipline should commit to developing the capacity to judge among readers. He is right. But the discipline has spent fifty years training its members to treat aesthetic judgment as a ruse of ideology. You cannot reverse that training with a paragraph in a coda.
The essay also performs what it describes. Emre reviews a Chicago Press book for The New Yorker. She discloses that she has written an introduction to a forthcoming edition of Guillory's earlier book. This is the cultural capital circuit Guillory analyzed in 1993 in Cultural Capital. The review is the practice it laments. I do not say this to indict her. The circuit is the only one available. There is no easy exit. The professional critic cannot become an amateur by force of will. The Substack writer cannot pay rent. The Goodreads reviewer cannot read at the level the work requires.
The end of the essay reaches for hope. Maybe the future of criticism lies outside the Anglosphere. Maybe state support elsewhere will sustain the work. Maybe new sites on the internet will host a different kind of practice. These are hopes dressed as arguments. State support brings its own deformations. The countries Emre gestures at have their own crises. The internet has produced more bad criticism than good, and the good has not been compensated.
Here is the harder claim. The great critic of the nineteenth century, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Coleridge, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) at the tail end, held cultural authority because the audience was small, literate in a shared canon, and ready to defer to a few voices that spoke with conviction. Those conditions are gone. They are not coming back. Universal literacy, mass media, the internet, the collapse of a shared curriculum, the dispersion of audiences across thousands of niches: none of this reverses. The great critic was a creature of a particular moment, and that moment ended around 1925. Woolf was the last witness.
What remains is smaller and stranger. A few good critics will write for whoever pays them. A few good professors will teach because they love it. A few amateur readers will keep the practice alive in their notebooks and their Substacks. The profession will keep shrinking. Graduate programs will admit fewer students. Tenure-track jobs will keep disappearing. None of this is a tragedy. The tragedy was the inflation of the profession in the first place.
Guillory's deepest insight, which Emre quotes but does not press, comes from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): every craft makes crooked. The professional reader is bent by the profession. The amateur reader sees what the professional has lost the capacity to see. Specialization costs something, and Nietzsche named the cost.
The honest path forward: accept that literary criticism was a public art for about three centuries, then a discipline for about one, and might soon be neither. What replaces it might resemble what came before. Readers who read because they love reading. Writers who write about books because they have something to say. Arguments in small venues for small audiences. Not a great age. Not a renaissance. A quieter practice, smaller in scope, freer in form.
Andrea Long Chu, interviewed by Merve Emre (Jan. 30, 2024)
The interview reveals more about Chu’s editorial position than her theory of criticism.
The flirting analogy fails on its own terms. Andrea Long Chu (b. 1992) claims you only flirt with people who already like you. Merve Emre catches the mistake. Salesmen, politicians, and pickup artists flirt with the indifferent and the hostile and sometimes succeed. Chu retreats to the romantic comedy, which is a different argument. The romcom convention assumes mutual attraction at the start. The original claim was about flirting in general.
The retreat matters because the analogy carries her view of criticism. She wants the critic’s job to be permission-granting rather than argument-making. The persuader admits his reader might disagree and tries to win him over with evidence. The permission-granter assumes the reader already agrees and helps him feel comfortable saying so. The second position needs a large pre-aligned audience. It works for Chu because she writes for New York Magazine, where most readers share her priors before they open the page.
This explains the structure of her practice. She does not need to convince anyone that Maggie Nelson (b. 1973) or Zadie Smith (b. 1975) deserves to be brought down a peg. The readership came in agreeing. She supplies the language and the permission. The Pulitzer rewards the craft of the supply.
Her Kant (1724-1804) exegesis is sharp where it counts. She corrects A. O. Scott (b. 1966) on subjective universality. She gets the point that beauty for Kant is not a property of objects but a feature of how certain feelings make us imagine other minds. She uses this to push past the contemplative Sontagian (1933-2004) version of taste. But the move papers over the question of authority. If judgments are groundless, the critic’s authority has to come from somewhere. Chu says it comes from “becoming responsible” for the groundless judgment. That is a moral posture rather than an answer. The answer she does not give is institutional. Her judgments carry because New York Magazine prints them.
The viciousness-cruelty distinction is sharp and self-serving. Viciousness is the starved attack dog. Cruelty is the handler. Chu places herself on the handler side. The distinction collapses if you ask, cruel to whom. The handler still inflicts harm. He just shows restraint about the maximum he might inflict. Chu wants credit for withholding what she could have done. The dead writer she reviewed does not benefit from the distinction.
Her reading of Zoe Leonard’s (b. 1961) “I want a president” is sharp in spots. She catches the constitutive impossibility: when the AIDS widower becomes president, he stops being the AIDS widower. She catches the girl-boss problem in how the Leonard piece got recycled in 2016. These observations earn the page they sit on.
But the first thing Chu does with the text is mention having seen it on Facebook. This is a status move. It places her above the meme audience while letting her engage with the text. Emre catches it and asks her to set it aside. Chu admits she said it to buy time. The admission is more revealing than the dodge.
Two moments of candor stand out. The first is the materialist line about academic writing: “I said this in that paper because I needed to finish the paper because I was on the plane.” That holds for most academic writing and almost no academic admits it. The second is the line about knowledge: “I am a fan of knowledge, usually in the abstract.” She does not pretend research is the substance of her work. The substance is judgment. Research is the dressing.
The political content has more bite than the theory. Chu rejects the Leonard piece’s identity demand and says she cares about the material effects of policies. This puts her on the Left-materialist side against Left-identitarian sentiment. The position marks her within a contested space. The 2016 readership that turned the Leonard piece into a Trump-era meme is the audience she most wants to differentiate herself from.
The hypomanic episode that produced “On Liking Women” lets her frame her breakthrough piece as something other than pure deliberation. The framing protects in both directions. Praise rewards her range. Critique gets softened by the medical context.
The Lauren Berlant (1957-2021) anecdote functions as humility-shaped status. A reviewer mistook Chu’s work for Berlant’s. Chu reports the mistake. Berlant said the styles differ. The comparison still gets made by the structure of the story.
The interview is a good performance of a critic who has built her position by attacking targets her readership wanted attacked. The Kant gives the operation philosophical cover. The flirting analogy gives it psychological cover. The viciousness-cruelty distinction gives it moral cover. Underneath the covers is a working writer at a magazine, doing what the magazine pays for, well.
‘What Does Freud Still Have to Teach Us?’ (The New Yorker, Jun. 3, 2024)
Emre writes well and surveys the biographical tradition with care. The central move—reading late Freud (1856-1939) as the Freud who carries weight—has merit. The postwar essays on mourning, the death drive, and civilization say more about the human condition than the Oedipal machinery that made him famous. She reviews the latest biography, Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Frank Tallis and credits him for treating his subject as a serious figure without canonizing him.
The essay's main weakness is that it dodges the question Tallis raises. Tallis asks how important Freud is. Emre never answers. She closes with H.D. (1886-1961) and the tender portrait of an aging professor who proclaimed that love was stronger than death. That softens the picture without addressing the harder question.
The treatment of Frederick Crews (b. 1933) is the tell. Crews spent decades documenting specific empirical problems with Freud's case histories: that he claimed cures he did not have, that he misrepresented his sources, that he suppressed counter-evidence, that he built theoretical edifices on patients he had seen once or twice or never. Emre calls his book "propaganda so savage" and psychologizes him as a "disowned son." That swaps biographical interpretation for rebuttal. If Crews is wrong about the documents, show it. Treating his case as a family drama avoids the question of whether the documents say what Crews says they say.
The essay also accepts Freud's framework as valuable poetry of the unconscious without facing the issue that repression as Freud described it does not survive empirical scrutiny, that infantile sexuality rests on thin evidence, that the Oedipus complex has none, and that psychoanalysis as a therapy performs poorly in outcome studies. One can defend Freud as a literary figure. One can defend him as a moral thinker about civilization and aggression. The harder question is whether his clinical claims were true. Emre does not take it up.
The "Freud for our time" trope itself raises a problem Emre treats as a virtue. If Freud can be refitted for 1920s Bengal, 1930s Tokyo, apartheid South Africa, transfemininity, the far right, and the contemporary American university, his work might function more as a screen for whatever the analyst brings than as a body of claims with content. The endless adaptability that signals vitality also signals emptiness. Emre takes only the first reading.
The Sophie Freud insertion deserves more pressure than it gets. Emre notes that Freud added the death drive to Beyond the Pleasure Principle after his daughter died of Spanish flu, and treats this as personal grief becoming theoretical depth. The opposite reading is available. A theorist who inserts his master concept into a book after a bereavement might be writing his own grief rather than discovering a fact about the species. That does not refute the concept. It does shift the burden of proof. The death drive needs evidence apart from its author's mood.
The H.D. ending moves the reader. It is also selection. H.D. came away from her analysis in love with Freud as a figure. Other patients did badly. Sergei Pankejeff (1886-1979), the Wolf Man, spent the rest of his life in and out of analysis with little to show for it and said in old age that he doubted Freud's interpretation had ever helped him. A biographical essay that closes on H.D. without weighing the rest of the clinical record is choosing its evidence.
What Emre gets right: Freud's late writings on civilization and aggression carry a force the early work does not. The critique of civilized sexual morality is sharp and still useful. His prose is one of the great prose styles of late nineteenth-century European letters. As a writer about ambivalence, mourning, and the costs of social order, he stays worth reading.
What the essay avoids: whether the clinical apparatus was built on documented fraud, whether the metapsychology has empirical support, and whether Tallis's question has a less flattering answer than the tradition wants to hear. Emre is a careful critic—her earlier work on personality testing was skeptical and exact—so the softness here looks like a choice rather than a limit. The New Yorker has a house Freud, affectionate and rueful, and this essay serves him.
The essay works well but pulls a switch on its own title. “Eavesdropping and Judging” promises a hard look at why people read advice columns, which is the pleasure of judging strangers without consequence. Merve Emre (b. 1985) opens that door with her line about “savagely social pleasure,” then walks away from it. The AITA close lands on warmth and the kindness of strangers. A cynical title gets a sentimental finish.
The strongest passage is on John Dunton (1659-1733) and the Athenian Mercury as flirtation. The Athenians as charming, playful, soliciting curiosity about their own identities. That observation works because it cuts against the moralizing function the column claims. The Mercury says it teaches virtue. It also runs on seduction. Emre sees the tension and lets it stand. The Dan Savage (b. 1964) history is also sharp, including the line about the joke ending up on him once straights embraced his vocabulary.
She loses her nerve on Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). The Ebony column she quotes is appalling. Tell a battered woman to check her own personality for what arouses her husband’s tyranny. Tell a gay teenager to see a psychiatrist. Emre gives one sentence: “So much for the arc of their moral universe.” That is a New Yorker quip where a paragraph of moral seriousness belongs. She found something that could have anchored a whole section and used it as a transition.
The Michael Warner (b. 1958) frame does real work in setting up how strangers form a public around shared reading habits. But it also flattens the variety. A penny broadsheet in 1690s London, the women’s pages of nineteenth-century newspapers, an alt-weekly column in 1991 Seattle, and a Reddit thread in 2020 do not belong on a single line. The publics differ in size, anonymity, screening, ritual, payment, gatekeeping. The piece smooths the differences to keep the publics-and-counterpublics frame intact.
The AITA reading romanticizes the platform. Emre acknowledges “goofy, immature, or simply unbelievable” posts in a single line and then spends pages on an affecting thread. AITA also generates performative outrage, creative writing by people inventing dilemmas, pile-ons against unsympathetic posters, and the voyeuristic judgment her title flags. The careful reading of the funeral thread is moving. It is not representative. Anyone who has spent time on the subreddit knows the average post is much closer to “AITA for being pissed at my parents for taking us to Athens Georgia” than to the funeral thread.
The Alexander Pope (1688-1744) etymology is a clever opening but Emre does not push it. Advice contains vice. The deeper point might be that giving advice tempts the adviser into self-display and the faults the advice claims to correct. The column has always been more about the columnist’s voice than the advisee’s problem. Emre sees this in her notes on pseudonyms and personal brands, but she does not connect it back to her opening. The Pope passage sits as decoration when it could be the spine.
The Mary Beth Norton (b. 1943) book is a pretext. The essay is Emre’s own meditation. That is fine for a New Yorker piece. But the review work is thin, and a reader who came for Norton leaves with a few hundred words on her and a few thousand on Emre’s argument.
One last thing. The Jane Austen (1775-1817) anecdote of Elinor Dashwood and Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility is the best illustration in the essay of what advice columns paper over. Elinor refuses to advise because Lucy wants endorsement, not counsel. Most readers of advice columns are Lucy. They write in to be told they are right. The Athenians refused often enough to be interesting. Most modern columnists, and most AITA respondents, oblige.
‘Catherine Lacey’s Infinite Regress’ (The New Yorker, June 17, 2025)
The interview is mutual flattery between two writers who know each other. Merve Emre (b. 1985) discloses she appears as a minor character in Catherine Lacey’s (b. 1985) earlier book, Biography of X. The questions stay gentle. Lacey gets to describe her growth without resistance.
The Möbius strip conceit is a gimmick. A Möbius strip has one continuous surface. Lacey’s book has two halves stitched at a binding. Calling it a Möbius book is branding, not topology. The interview tries to rescue the metaphor by suggesting that bisexuality maps onto a non-orientable surface. Lacey says this insight blows her mind. The reader can decide.
The most candid moment comes when Lacey admits her original nonfiction draft lacked “another voice critiquing what I was going through.” She wrote a fictional companion to supply that voice. This is an interesting craft solution. It also raises a question the interview does not ask: if she needed fiction to critique her nonfiction, why should anyone trust the nonfiction?
Her account of losing faith is thin. Methodist Mississippi was conservative. She questioned. She could not talk about doubt. She found college friends. She does not describe what broke her faith intellectually. The memoir presents mood, not argument. She mentions Michael Warner (b. 1958) and his essay “Tongues Unbound,” but Warner does theoretical work on Pentecostal experience. Lacey envies the Pentecostals their ecstasy and stops there.
The “I always felt very masculine, but I was never not a woman” passage is the familiar move of the contemporary literary writer. She borrows astrology to “degender” character. Saturn energy. Mars energy. She asserts that masculine and feminine traits exist independent of biological sex but does not examine the claim. Her complaint that straight men kept refusing “this part of me” frames it as their failure. The interview does not press her on her own role in the pattern.
The spiritual cleanser passage shows the same pattern. Lacey visits a woman named Michal who removes a demon from her leg. Lacey is “skeptical about the reality of the demon” but accepts the experience. This is the contemporary literary stance toward religion. Take the experience, leave the metaphysics. She compares the demon to fiction. A record of what never happened and yet happened. Convenient.
The strongest passage is on platonic love. Her closest friends date from her first years of college. She dreams of her one lost friend, not her ex-lovers. The hierarchy she describes sounds true. Friends at the top. Partner close behind. Everyone else below. This is honest because it cuts against the romantic-love-as-summit assumption of most memoir.
Her remark on remarriage is also honest. She says giving up the form because the first instance failed seems like a waste. She values the ritual even after the ritual failed her. That points to something Methodist still in her, though she does not name it.
The “compromised character” pose is a tell. Lacey says no memoirist should seem virtuous. She wants to be a suspicious narrator. But the interview lets her control the suspicion. She picks which compromises to confess.
She references Derek Parfit (1942-2017) on the non-existence of the self and a line from Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) by way of Chris Kraus (b. 1955). The Parfit and Deleuze name-checks do philosophical work the interview does not require her to defend. Parfit’s bundle theory of the self is not a license for memoir; it might be an argument against memoir.
The closing line, “We’re all in the same fucked-up little boats,” is the contemporary memoirist’s defense against the charge of self-indulgence. If everyone suffers, my account of my suffering is universal. The defense is unfalsifiable.
The most interesting biographical fact she gives away in passing: she still believed in waiting until marriage. She did not fall toward sex when she fell from religion. She fell into refusal of her body. That is the seed of the story she is now still writing.
‘What Makes Goethe So Special?’ (The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2025)
Emre writes a competent New Yorker review-essay, well-paced and elegant in its biographical sketch, but it is finally a tour rather than an argument. She raises the most interesting question in the piece in her last paragraphs, by way of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and then closes before pressing it.
The question Benjamin posed for his unfinished Soviet encyclopedia entry is the right one. How does a man “who had existed so thoroughly in compromises” produce work of such extravagance? Goethe (1749-1832) served Karl August for fifty years, helped suppress student societies, accommodated Napoleon, told friends he preferred injustice to disorder, and conspired with Schiller to shrink the literary marketplace so fewer mediocre books got published. He was, among other things, an ambitious bureaucrat with conservative instincts. And he wrote Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Elective Affinities, and Faust. Emre lets Bell’s phrase, “an unusual form of compromise,” carry the weight here without testing it. She does not ask whether the compromise was generative rather than merely tolerated. The duchy gave Goethe ballast. The duchy needed his prestige. Each made the other possible. That is more interesting than the Romantic story of the artist against his age, and Emre touches it without developing it.
Two absences stand out. The first is Goethe’s science. Emre lists geology, morphology, color in a clause and moves on. But Goethe took his scientific work as seriously as his poetry, perhaps more so. The Theory of Colors, the plant morphology, the proto-evolutionary thinking on the metamorphosis of plants and the intermaxillary bone, the geological speculation, his contempt for Newton on color, his attraction to Spinoza on the divinity of nature – these are not side hobbies. They sit at the center of what Bell apparently calls his religion of nature. A biography subtitled A Life in Ideas presumably deals with this. The review barely does.
The second absence is Faust 2. Emre handles Faust 1 in a paragraph, quotes Mephistopheles on hiring a poet, and gestures toward Faust 2 only as something Goethe struggled to finish before he died. But the second part is the climactic work, one of the strangest things in the European canon – the Helena episode, the Homunculus, the Classical Walpurgisnacht, the land reclamation that ends with Faust’s salvation through ceaseless striving. The late Goethe is stranger than the early Goethe. A review that gives Werther four paragraphs and Faust 2 a sentence has its proportions wrong.
The “Goethean types” device feels like Cliff Notes. Goethe’s characters resist that kind of collection. Werther is not a type called “the longing man.” Faust is not “the Faustian-bargain hunter.” This is the prose habit of the survey-essay, where everything must be summarized for a reader who has not read the work and will not.
What Emre does well is the human texture. The horoscope opening, the dead-on-arrival birth, the pulmonary hemorrhage at Leipzig, the auto-da-fé of the juvenile poems, the wretched little fox, the Italian sex awakening at thirty-eight, the marriage to Christiane Vulpius (1765-1816) during the French looting, the corpulent little female at court. These details land. She has an eye. And she handles Goethe’s politics without flinching, which is harder than it looks. The standard move is to apologize for the late conservatism, or to dissolve it into irony. She names it.
The frame is the impossibility of writing this life. Nicholas Boyle (b. 1946) gave up after volume two of three, twenty-five years ago. Benjamin gave up before finishing his draft. The one-volume biographers are necessarily compressed. Goethe outruns his biographers, and Emre’s essay ends up demonstrating the problem.
The Buffer and Its Borrowed Saints: Merve Emre and Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor splits the self in two. The porous self, the older one, stands open to the world. Meaning comes from outside as much as inside, and forces and other men and the charge of things cross a thin border and move it. The porous self can be entered, so it can be hurt. The buffered self is the modern build. It draws the line at the edge of the mind, makes its own meaning, and lets nothing cross without consent. It is bounded, disengaged, in command, and safe. Taylor calls the buffer an invention in A Secular Age, a stance men learned, not a report on how men have always been.
Read Emre with that split in hand and her program is a campaign for the buffer.
Her praise words are the buffer’s words. Cold, clear, controlled, unsentimental. Distance, judgment, the tone that brooks no disagreement, the grownup laying down the law. Each names a self sealed at its edge. Her scorn words belong to the porous self. Messy, warm, breathless, leaking, the writer with no firm line between herself and what she feels. She crowns the first as adulthood and sends the second back to the nursery.
Look at the passage she most admires, Gaitskill on mechanicalness. The mature essayist, she says, attends to the machinery of life, notes its predictability and self-absorption, grinds human dealings into dirty shards. That gaze is the buffer’s own. The buffered self lives in a disenchanted world, a world of process without presence, and it looks out and sees machinery where the porous self saw spirit. Emre takes the disenchanting eye and calls its work an ethical prerogative. She has crowned the buffer’s way of seeing as virtue.
Here she tangles herself, and the tangle is the find. She does not charge the warm essayist with too much openness to the world. She charges her with the reverse, with solipsism, a self so swollen that every road runs back to the I. And she claims her cold critic is the open one, the one who attends, who shares a world. So she wants the seal and the world at once. On Taylor’s terms that cannot hold. The buffer is the thing that shuts the world out. Disengagement buys safety by cutting the wire. She has taken the sealed stance and credited it with the contact only an open self can make.
Her saints give her away. She leans on Weil’s painful clarity and on the whole tradition that attention is a moral act. But attention in Weil is decreation. The self empties, the bounded ego comes down, and the soul waits open and undefended so the real can enter without a screen. That is the most porous act a man can perform. Iris Murdoch built the same ethics in The Sovereignty of Good, and her attention points at the full reality of another person, granting him his weight, the opposite of grinding him into shards. Emre borrows the prestige of attention-as-virtue from thinkers who aimed it at the irreducible person, and turns it on mechanicalness. She drafts the porous mystics into the buffer’s army and reads their openness as her coldness. The clarity she calls control is, at its source, the unmaking of control.
Her metaphysics runs the same line. When she calls the private individual a concept rather than a person, an idea to be unmasked, she enacts the buffer’s first principle, that meaning lives inside the bounded mind and is made there, never received from a world that crosses in. The personal essay’s I is the trace of a porous self, leaking, world-open, formed among others. She demotes that I to an ideological fiction. Only the disengaged stance gets to count as real. The open self gets called a lie. The buffer goes further than preference. It legislates the bounded self as the only true self and writes the porous one out of existence.
If men are social and open from the start, as the anthropology behind the porous self holds, then the buffer is a late cultural product, a useful fiction, not a description of what a man is. The cold critic’s claim to deeper contact with the world is then the fiction at full volume, since the seal she prizes is what bars the contact she boasts of. The attention she admires is real. The buffer she credits it to is not. She has the phenomenology backward, calling the open act control and the controlled stance openness.
And the buffer is the self the institutions need. The bounded, defensible, professional self is the ideal worker, and criticism as a profession, the thing she campaigns for, is a buffered craft, its authority resting on the verdict handed down from behind a wall. The porous essayist threatens that, leaky and democratic, needing no chair to confess. So the seal is not only Emre’s ideal. It is her livelihood, and the chair and the magazine and the profession pay her to defend it.
She is the case and the enforcer in one. The buffer is her self-image, her product, and her institution’s demand. She sells the seal as maturity and the openness as childhood, and to do it she conscripts Weil and Murdoch, who spent their lives unmaking the seal. The wall she praises stands between the critic and the world she says the critic alone can see, and the saints she summons to guard it were the ones who tore it down.
What She Cannot Afford to Doubt: Merve Emre’s Convenient Beliefs
Stephen Turner says a convenient belief is one a man holds because it serves his position, not because he has grounded it. The function explains the holding better than the evidence does. The test is simple. Ask what it would cost him to give the belief up. When the cost, and not the proof, is what keeps the belief in place, you are looking at convenience. Turner is careful to add that this is not lying. The belief feels true precisely because it pays, and the payment works below awareness. Run Emre through the instrument and a pattern comes up.
Her master belief is that unsentimental clarity is neutral ground, the standard of good criticism, the view from nowhere. She never argues this. She assumes it. Ask what dropping it would cost her. The cost is everything. If clarity is one partisan tradition with a history and not the neutral measure, then her verdicts fall from findings to opinions, the writers she exiled earn a hearing, and her standing as the cold authority sinks to the level of one more reader with a preference. The belief survives because she cannot afford to doubt it. That is the signature.
Her second belief is that attention to form and style is serious and that affective or identifying criticism is unserious. The word serious does the ranking that no argument supplies. Drop the belief and she must grant that the warm reading is serious in its own way, that her mode is one valid mode among several. She would lose the automatic superiority the honorific hands her. So the honorific stays, unexamined, because examining it would cost her the high seat.
Her third belief is that the appetite for easy and legible cultural forms is a symptom of late capitalism. Hold it and she is the demystifier who sees through the system, and her taste becomes political insight, resistance to capital rather than snobbery about what most men enjoy. Drop it, admit the hunger for the easy is old as the species and present in every order, and her critique loses its grandeur and shrinks to a complaint about the popular. The belief pays in dignity, so she keeps it.
Her fourth belief is that the humanities declined from a failure of academic imagination and style. Hold it and the cure is the thing she supplies, criticism as a public art, critics like her, and she becomes the figure who might have saved the field and might yet. Drop it, concede that the decline is mostly structural, defunding and the labor market and the cost of a degree, and style turns out to be nearly beside the point, and her mission shrinks to nostalgia. The belief flatters her with a heroic role, so the structural account never gets its due.
Her fifth belief is that the expressive self of the personal essay is an ideological fiction. Hold it and her demolition of the genre is an act of unmasking, a service to truth. Drop it, grant that the self is real and the essay tracks a real man, and her prosecution becomes one critic disliking a kind of book. The belief converts a taste into a truth-claim and a dismissal into a duty, which is a handsome return, so she banks it.
Every one of these convictions points the same way. Each elevates her mode, her authority, her remedy, her purity. A man whose beliefs about his own field uniformly make him the hero of it is not reporting the results of inquiry. Honest inquiry does not return findings that flatter the inquirer at every turn. When the alignment is this clean, convenience is doing the selecting.
The Tacit That Isn’t There: Merve Emre and Stephen Turner
Turner’s quarrel is with a common idea in the human sciences. Polanyi gave it its slogan, that we know more than we can tell, and from there it spread into every field that needed to explain how members of a group come to agree and perform alike. Kuhn’s paradigms, Wittgenstein’s forms of life, Bourdieu’s habitus, all lean on the same posit, a shared tacit substrate, lodged below speech, transmitted by training, that grounds the common competence of those who hold it. Turner spends The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit dismantling the posit. His claim is blunt. There is no collective tacit object. Nothing is shared in the way the story needs.
Emre’s defense of criticism is a defense of this posit. Serious reading is a trained discrimination, a competence the qualified share and the amateur lacks, a judgment that resists reduction to rules. The trained eye sees form and style where the untrained sees only plot and feeling. That is the tacit-knowledge model of critical authority laid down whole.
Where is the shared object? What gets transmitted in a literary training is model readings, examples, and the approval of those already inside. Each student forms his own habits of attention from that and learns which moves draw praise. No common tacit content can be shown, because none can be handed over. So the trained critical sensibility she invokes is a posit standing behind the agreements of a guild, not a thing anyone can point to. And the only evidence that the sensibility exists is that the qualified tend to agree, which is the very thing it was called in to explain. A good reading is one that good readers recognize. Good readers are the ones whose readings good readers recognize. The circle closes with no object inside it.
If the ground is a posit no outsider can inspect, then the authority built on it is self-certifying. When she rules against Chew-Bose and a reader outside the guild dissents, she can retreat to the tacit, the line that he would see it with training. That retreat cannot be answered from outside, and the boundary of who has the training is drawn from inside, by the people who already share her taste. The membership defines the competence and the competence defines the membership.
Habits can be disciplined by an external task, the way a builder’s tacit skill answers to whether the wall stands. There the posit of shared competence at least meets a check outside the guild. Criticism has almost no such task. No event tests a verdict. So the habits of the literary expert are disciplined by nothing but the recognition of other experts, which means the posited shared tacit cashes out, in the end, as in-group agreement and nothing besides. Strip away the agreement and there is no residue to call a standard.
Here the frame turns reflexive, and the turn is clean. Emre’s loudest complaint is that critics fail to engage the text and instead project their feelings. She demands articulable contact with the object, the demonstrable features of the prose. Yet her own authority rests on a competence she grants cannot be fully stated. The connoisseur’s appeal, you would see it if you were trained, is the opposite of engage the text. So she demands of others a standard she exempts herself from. She wants two things that pull against each other, the objectivity of features anyone could be shown and the authority of a tacit discrimination only the initiated possess. If the warrant is the articulable feature, the tacit appeal is needless. If the warrant is the tacit gift, the demand for plain textual engagement is a rule she breaks every time she judges.
Her campaign to professionalize criticism inherits the whole problem. A profession assumes a transmissible body of tacit competence to train people into. Turner’s transmission critique says there is no such body to transmit. A profession of criticism would not be passing along a shared tacit knowledge. It would be reproducing the guild’s recognized performances and policing who counts as a member. The profession dresses boundary-keeping as the custody of an expertise, and what it breeds is fluency in the approved moves.
The Sect That Calls Itself a Science: Merve Emre and Stephen Turner on Expertise
Turner takes up experts as a problem for democracy. He asks if their authority can be legitimate in a society of equals who cannot check what the expert claims. How does a democracy defer to expert judgment without surrendering self-rule? That is the question in “What Is the Problem with Experts?” and in Liberal Democracy 3.0.
Now place the literary critic. Ask what kind of expert Emre is when she rules that Chew-Bose has failed and Gaitskill has succeeded. Her authority rests on premises, the priority of form over feeling, the superiority of unsentimental clarity, the whole creed of serious reading. Inside the community that holds those premises her judgments carry weight. Outside it, among the readers who love the warm essay, among the public who bought the book she condemns, her authority is recognized not at all. So critical expertise of her distinctive kind is sectarian. It is the theologian’s authority, not the physicist’s. It holds within the faith and stops at its border.
Her move is to present this sectarian authority as the universal kind. She hands down verdicts as findings. She uses the grammar of objective standards, serious and unserious, as though a reader who dissents had failed a public test rather than declined a partisan creed. She asks the general public to defer to her judgment the way it defers to a physicist, when what she possesses is the standing of a priest among those who already share her doctrine. The demand for public deference from a sectarian expert is the precise thing Turner flags. She wants the universal warrant for a partisan office.
Her campaign to professionalize criticism inherits the error and formalizes it. Credentials, a guild, official standing, these do not convert sectarian authority into universal authority. They only build the sect a church. A professionalized criticism would be an established clergy, not a science, and Turner’s worry in Liberal Democracy 3.0 is the established-clergy worry, experts becoming a funded and credentialed estate that claims neutral competence while it carries a creed and an interest. The professional dress lets a contested aesthetic ride into the public square wearing the robes of expert knowledge, the values smuggled in under the cover of competence.
The critic’s standing is underwritten by the university and the prestige magazine. Her authority is granted by these patrons, not earned by results the public can see and accept. That is the established-church kind of authority, dependent on who funds and credentials it, and it is far from the universal kind, which needs no patron because its results compel assent on their own. And the discretion such authority asks for is the open-ended kind Turner distrusts. Trust my trained judgment in matters you cannot check. With no external test to discipline it, that discretion expands. The critic who answers to no result widens her writ, ruling on which book is serious, which essayist is childish, what the reading public ought to value, and nothing outside the guild ever tells her to stop.
So her wish for a criticism that is at once public-facing and expert runs straight into Turner’s tension. A democracy of readers cannot be asked to defer to a sect as though it were a science. Either critical authority is universal, validated by something the whole public accepts, and the contested rankings she favors are not, or it is sectarian, in which case demanding public deference is the illegitimate move, the clergy lecturing the laity in the voice of neutral truth. Public-facing expertise, in her mouth, means asking the public to defer to the congregation’s verdicts, not to judge the books for themselves.
Unmasking is her trade. She exposes the personality test and the institution as authorities that claim neutral standing while serving an interest. Turner’s account of expertise points that same suspicion at her. Her critical authority is an institution claiming neutral competence while enforcing a partisan creed and serving the interest of a credentialed guild and its patrons. She unmasks every authority but the one she sits on.
The Denial in the Courage: Merve Emre and Ernest Becker
Becker says a man knows he will die, the knowledge is unbearable, and culture exists to manage the terror by handing him a hero system, a scheme of meaning in which he can feel significant, special, an object of cosmic value, and so symbolically immortal. He lays this out in The Denial of Death. The hero system buys transcendence over the body, over the animal, over the creature that sweats and decays and dies, and Becker calls the illusions that make it work the vital lie. In Escape from Evil he adds the dark half. We purchase our own purity by loading our mortality onto a class of others and casting them out. The scapegoat carries our death so we can stand clean.
On the surface Emre looks like the one figure who has escaped all of this.
Her essays are soaked in death, and she crowns the writers who stare at it. She praises Gaitskill’s line that to be human is to be a loser, fated to lose strength, health, dignity, and life, and that refusing to tolerate this is refusing to tolerate life. She praises Arendt and Weil for draining the feeling out of their prose before the camps and the bomb. Her ideal is the writer who looks straight at the worst and takes no comfort. No consolation, no warmth, no vital lie. By her own account she has done the hardest human thing. She has faced the terror without flinching.
Becker saw the trap waiting here. The confrontation with death can be the most refined hero system of all. The man who says I face death and refuse all consolation has found a way to be a hero through the refusal. His unflinching gaze becomes his claim to significance, his transcendence over the herd that needs comfort. The courage hardens into armor. He has not escaped the denial of death. He has moved it into the pose of facing it. So Emre’s death-facing creed is a hero system in the costume of having renounced hero systems. The refusal of the vital lie is her vital lie.
Look at the currency she trades in. She earns her significance through rigor, coldness, and standing apart. The unsentimental critic rises above the mortal, sentimental mass who flee into self-soothing. To be tough enough is to be more than a creature. Her clarity outlasts feeling, her verdict outlasts the warm body that produced the confession. The cold critic is symbolically immortal in the only way a critic can be, by judging rather than dying, by handing the sentence down from a place the mess cannot reach.
Now the body. What we deny is the animal, the sweating, leaking, needy, dying creature. What we exalt is the symbolic self that floats free of it. Read Emre’s contempt with that in mind. The warm essayist is all creature. She leaks feeling, parades the wound, the appetite, the hygiene gaffe, the breathless body with no firm edge. Emre finds this disgusting and says so. She flees it into pure symbol, form and structure and the disembodied judgment. Her aesthetic is the flight from creatureliness, the denial of the animal, dressed as adulthood. The thing she cannot stand to read is the body admitting that it is a body.
And the personal essayists are her scapegoats. They carry what she must expel, the neediness, the hunger to be soothed, the leaking mortal self that wants its wound to count in the cosmos. By naming them childish and narcissistic and unserious and casting them out of the republic of serious letters, she purges in them the weakness she cannot tolerate in herself. The expulsion buys her purity. She stands clean because they carry the contamination.
Here her own borrowed standard turns on her. Gaitskill’s line, which Emre crowns, says that refusing to tolerate the mortal condition is refusing to tolerate life. But Emre cannot tolerate the mortal, creaturely, comfort-seeking side of writing. She cannot tolerate the confessor’s neediness, which is only the human need for comfort made visible on a page. So by the measure she raised over her own head, she fails. She has not accepted that she is a dying creature who wants consolation like everyone else. She built the cold persona to deny it. The writer she praises says accept that you are a loser who dies. Emre cannot accept that she is, like the confessor, a creature who wants to be held, so she becomes the one who needs nothing, and the need-nothing pose is the denial at its most polished.
Late Capitalism
The phrase does several jobs at once.
First, it compresses a huge complaint into two words. A broken airline app, a $19 airport sandwich, a self-checkout screen asking for a tip, a corporate memo written in therapy language. All of it folds under one label. The user gets a grand diagnosis without having to explain zoning law, monetary policy, or healthcare licensing. Low cost of entry, high payoff in apparent sophistication.
Second, the word “late” carries a theory of history smuggled inside an adjective. People do not say “industrial capitalism” or “consumer capitalism” with the same mood. “Late” sounds like late Rome or the late Soviet period. It tells the speaker he lives not in a hard society but in a dying one. That reframing soothes. Stagnation becomes decline, and decline implies something comes next. Marxism inherited this shape from Christian eschatology, and the phrase keeps the residue even for users who never read a word of Marx.
Third, the term grants moral distance. The heaviest users are not factory workers. They are journalists, graduate students, nonprofit staff, designers, academics, tech employees. Men and women threaded into the institutions of advanced capitalism. Calling a market absurdity “late capitalism” recasts the speaker as a trapped observer rather than a participant who helps reproduce the thing. It converts complicity into awareness, and awareness into a kind of absolution. Recognition starts to feel like resistance. You can buy the luxury goods, build your identity on the platforms, work for the prestige employer, and still pose as the one who sees through it all.
Fourth, it works as a coalition badge. Use it and you signal where you stand: educated, skeptical of markets and corporate culture, fluent in critical vocabulary. The phrase is affiliative more than descriptive. The places where it circulates, universities and media and cultural industries, reward that fluency.
The term substitutes atmosphere for argument. Once every problem becomes a symptom of one civilizational epoch, the differences between problems vanish. High housing costs in Los Angeles run on land-use rules, environmental review, and homeowner coalitions guarding scarcity. Social media addiction runs on behavioral design and status competition. American healthcare runs on insurance structures and licensing cartels. Collapse all three into “late capitalism” and you get emotional coherence at the price of understanding. The diagnosis grows too large to act on, so it breeds spectatorship.
The phrase survives because it names something real. People feel market logic seeping into places it never used to reach. Dating becomes a platform. Friendship becomes networking. Leisure becomes content. Attention becomes a resource somebody harvests. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) saw the front edge of this in One-Dimensional Man: an advanced society absorbs its own opposition instead of crushing it. Digital capitalism went further and sells the dissent back. Anti-corporate style becomes a marketing campaign. Streaming services release documentaries condemning consumerism while running engagement analytics to keep you subscribed. So “late capitalism” is not outside the system. It is one of the system’s products. Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) gave it academic weight, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and the Frankfurt School supplied the ancestry, and the prestige economy turned the critique into a marker of taste.
‘An Unsentimental Education’: Merve Emre introduces ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’ (Apr. 24, 2025)
Merv Emre writes for the New York Review of Books about the Tom Wolfe novel I am Charlotte Simmons.
The introduction reads: “This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to a new edition of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, to be published by Picador in May.”
The sub-head reads: “Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals.”
Every romantic vision gets pierced by reality. Anyone who conceives of any place on this earth as an unblighted Eden will be disappointed. Charlotte Simmons is not destroyed by her time at DuPont.
Tom Wolfe is doing what he always does — paying close attention to status details with scene-by-scene construction, multiple points of view and liberal use of realistic dialogue. He doesn’t mock the university any more than he mocks his average subject.
Emre begins:
“I am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education.”
The construction “which many people believe” is pathetic. Anyone who thinks this is Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book hasn’t read many Wolfe books.
The rescue framing is the original sin of the piece. Wolfe sold millions of books, won the National Book Foundation Medal in 2010, and shaped American journalism for fifty years. He does not need Emre’s permission to be read. The premise that a literary critic at Wesleyan must rehabilitate him for the NYRB audience treats the literary critical establishment as the legitimacy gate. The reading public walked past that gate twenty years ago and bought the book anyway. Emre’s “I read it on the bookstore floor” pose tries to claim authentic access to a book that needed no such mediation.
The romantic vision argument is sentimental. Every institution disappoints idealization. Marriage. The Church. The Army. The Family. Treating the university as a special case requires either ignorance of other institutions or a special investment in this one. Emre teaches at Wesleyan. She has the investment. Her readers do too. The framing flatters them by pretending the disappointment is specific to the institution they paid for and now work in.
Charlotte does not come down because of the university. She arrives with a pride her parents and teachers cultivated. The university supplies new material for the pride and new venues for it. The corruption was already there in Sparta. Wolfe says so. “Her parents and her teachers, outwardly afraid of sin, cannot see how they have planted it deep in Charlotte’s soul.” Emre quotes the line and then ignores its implication. If Sparta planted the seed, the university only watered it. The university did not cause the harvest.
The “crudest and most offensive” framing is a class signal. Offensive to whom? To the literary academic class that felt the book was about them. Back to Blood (2012) is more provocative on race and ethnicity. Bonfire of the Vanities was harder on the Black urban political machine than Charlotte Simmons is on anyone. The reason Charlotte gets singled out as offensive is that the academic class read the book as a portrait of their own institution and felt named. Offensive is subjective and the subject here is the offended class.
The moral education claim is guild flattery. The empirical case that literature makes readers morally better is thin. Heavy readers do not score higher on honesty, kindness, or compassion than non-readers. Hitler read widely. Stalin annotated novels. The English professoriate maintains the literature-improves-character story because that story funds the department. When a former English major says a novel played a part in her moral education, she is reaffirming the guild belief. Emre is paying her tribe.
Emre writes about herself and the protagonist:
Lacking money and culture and connections, she possessed nothing but her simple faith in the university as the place where she would finally be recognized for what she was: exceptional in mind and body, and pure of heart.
What an obtuse sentence from America’s most privileged about America’s most privileged. The “nothing but simple faith” description fits neither Charlotte nor Emre. Charlotte is valedictorian, Presidential Scholar, intellectually proud, calculating about her competition. She arrives at Dupont with substantial cognitive capital. Emre arrived at her East Coast university with whatever it took to get in. Both were already on track to elite institutions before they walked through the gates. The pose of innocent striver-from-nowhere is romantic projection. The girls who get to those schools are not random poor kids from a river town. They are local stars with cultivated abilities, supported parents, and helpful teachers. Charlotte’s poverty is Wolfe’s narrative device, not a sociological portrait of elite admissions.
Emre writes: “The students did very little reading or writing.”
How do you know? That is an impossible claim. You can’t graduate from an elite college with very little reading or writing (unless you’re a valuable athlete who’s treated with kid gloves). Wolfe focused on parties and sex because that was his subject. The students at Dupont also read enough to pass exams and wrote enough to earn degrees. The novel is selective realism by design. Treating Wolfe’s selections as the totality of student life misreads the form. A novel about a fishing village does not show the people sleeping. A novel about campus parties does not show the people studying.
Emre writes: “Charlotte Simmons tried to rise above the lure of sex and money and social status, the fatal desire to be someone whom everyone knew and talked about.”
The desire to be someone everyone knows and talks about is not fatal. It drives human achievement. Thymos in Plato (428-348 BC). Megalothymia in Fukuyama (b. 1952). The desire for recognition produces entrepreneurs, athletes, scientists, politicians, artists, soldiers, and writers. Without it, civilization runs on subsistence work and family love and not much else. Treating it as pathology is the standard English-department moralism, and it sits oddly in an essay by someone who teaches at Wesleyan and writes for the NYRB and has cultivated her own visibility. The literary critic who decries status-seeking while seeking status performs a familiar move and undermines herself. Emre wants Charlotte’s ambition to be tragic so the essay has a moral. The ambition is normal. Most readers of the essay share it. Most of the people in the room at the New York Review of Books share it.
On “wasting opportunities”: where is the evidence Charlotte wasted hers? She kept her grades up enough to stay enrolled. She joined a sorority, which produces lifelong networks and marriage prospects. She became the girlfriend of the star basketball player, which produces social location and access. She made friends. She learned how to read a campus. She acquired the soft skills of elite passing her parents could not teach her. By any measure elite parents use to evaluate their children, Charlotte did well her freshman year. The only frame on which she wasted her time is the Platonic-clerical frame where college exists for contemplation of the truth and anything else counts as failure. Almost no one operates by that frame, including the people writing essays in NYRB. They send their children to elite universities for the networks and the credentials. They just write about it as if they did not.
The deeper problem in Emre’s essay: it participates in the elite posture where the only acceptable relationship to one’s status is performed ambivalence. Oxford should make you feel bad. Caring what people think should make you feel bad. Wanting to be known should make you feel bad. The performance launders the privileges of the people performing it. Wolfe spent his career satirizing this posture. Emre’s essay reproduces what Wolfe satirized.
Charlotte ends the novel socially located and adapted to her environment. She has not died. She has not lost her mind. She has not been ruined. She has joined the world. Emre invites the reader to view this with pity because the moralist frame requires pity for any character who chooses social life over the life of the mind. One can read the novel with pity. One can also read it with congratulations. Wolfe leaves the door open. Emre walks through only one of them.
Emre writes: “The girl I knew returned to the bookstore to read and reread the novel, hoping perhaps for a different ending. Each time it was the same, and each time its finality angered her, then strengthened her resolve.”
That makes no sense. The passage falls apart on inspection.
Books do not change between readings. The ending stays the same. A reader who returns to a book hoping for a different ending performs a behavior no reader performs. People reread to understand better, to revisit pleasure, to mine for craft. They do not reread expecting plot changes. Emre is reporting a fictional emotional state to demonstrate her literary sensitivity. The behavior described is irrational. The pose is the point.
The “strengthened her resolve” line has its own problem. Resolve to do what? The implied answer is resolve to not become Charlotte. Resolve to remain intellectually serious. Resolve to choose the life of the mind over social adaptation. But Emre became a professor at Oxford. She writes for the NYRB. She has cultivated elite literary visibility for twenty years. She is not the woman who rejected the Charlotte Simmons arc. She is the woman who completed it at a higher altitude. The resolve to be different from Charlotte produced an Emre who is a more credentialed Charlotte. The essay rests on a premise the essay’s own author refutes.
The bookstore mechanics deserve a second look. She did not own the book. She read it on the bookstore floor, behind a column, hiding from the clerks. Emre presents the hiding as practical concealment. It reads more like shame about reading Wolfe at her elite university. Reading the campus novelist who satirizes elite universities required hiding. If true, the scene diagnoses the institution. Emre does not pursue the diagnosis. She uses the scene only to position herself as a humble outsider, which she was not. A student at an old East Coast university trained to read Wolfe critically is not Charlotte Simmons. She is a junior version of Emre at Oxford.
The whole rhetorical setup wants the reader to see her as both Charlotte-adjacent (poor reader on the floor) and Charlotte-superior (the reader who saw through the seduction). The self-positioning requires a younger self who suffered Charlotte’s temptations without falling for them. The evidence in the paragraph contradicts this. Emre fell for the same things Charlotte fell for. She just won the version of the game played at a higher level.
The passage performs literary sensibility. A young intellectual reads with such fervor she rebels against the author’s conclusion. This is the literary critic’s self-image. Emre narrates a hagiographic version of her own reading life. The narration does not survive contact with her biography.
Emre writes:
Twenty years later I can look at my young self and wonder that she should have understood so little—about the novel, and about the university, the relentless pressure it exerts on the souls of its inhabitants. A person who prided herself on withstanding this pressure would not only end up surrendering to it like everyone else but also experience her surrender as tragic, while everyone else would merely smile at her naiveté and self-importance. I had failed to understand this because, like Charlotte Simmons, I believed in the university. I believed in it in the same way that many people believed in the church, as a place of the purest and highest purpose. Walking through its gates had seemed to me an act of rebirth. Everyone was washed clean. Nothing that came before counted against you—not where you were born, or where you went to high school, or how much money your family had—and everything that came after depended only on your innate and enduring gifts: your discipline, your intuition, the sheer velocity of your thought. I had also failed to understand it because, like Charlotte Simmons, I maintained a stubborn sense of my own exceptionality. I believed that my mind and my character were as inviolable as the university I had entered. Or rather, I believed that our fates were entwined in some grand human drama in which I played a vital role, and whose outcome I could imagine only as triumphant.
Emre has been given 20 years of evidence that reality is porous, but she still clings to her buffered identity because it pays. Emre makes her living pretending that we are buffered individuals navigating life through the power of reason.
The passage is a structured confession of porousness that the essay treats as a foundation for buffered analysis.
Emre’s confession. The university exerts “relentless pressure” on the souls of its inhabitants. Anyone who prides herself on withstanding this pressure ends up surrendering to it. The surrender feels tragic to her and ridiculous to everyone else. She believed in the university like a church. She thought walking through its gates meant rebirth. She thought everyone was washed clean. She thought her gifts alone would carry her. She believed her mind and character were inviolable. She maintained a stubborn sense of her own exceptionality. The list reads as a self-portrait of a young person formed by an institution she thought she had merely entered. She names the religious form (church, rebirth, washed clean). She names the meritocratic ideology (discipline, intuition, velocity of thought). She names the personal pride (inviolability, exceptionality). She names the dramatic frame (grand human drama, vital role, triumphant outcome). The young Emre was a textbook case.
Then the essay carries on as if her current vantage point sits outside the pressure she just described. The mature Emre writes from Wesleyan for the NYRB about how the young Emre was deluded. The mature Emre’s position requires a deeper buffered claim than the young Emre’s. The young Emre thought she was inviolable inside the university. The mature Emre thinks she is inviolable above the university while still inside it. The pressure continued to operate. It just produced more sophisticated forms of self-presentation.
The literary critic’s job description requires the pretense of analytical distance from the institutions she analyzes. NYRB pays for that pretense. Wesleyan pays for that pretense. The literary critical profession sells buffered analysis of porous lives. Emre cannot abandon the pretense without abandoning the paycheck. So she confesses porousness at the young-self level and reasserts buffered analysis at the present-self level. The confession functions to license the analysis.
Status-claiming evolves with sophistication. The frat boy claims status through the fight response. The basketball player claims status through dunking. The student journalist claims status through prize-winning articles. The literary critic claims status through introductions that announce her superiority to the prizes she once chased. Same desire. More sophisticated form.
The Emre passage is also a concession that universities work the way Wolfe said they work. The “relentless pressure” line grants the diagnosis. The novel is right about institutional formation. Emre cannot say so without conceding she has been formed by the same pressure. So she stages the concession at the level of her young self and exempts her current self. The exemption is the literary critic’s standard move. It does not survive the scrutiny you give it.
Emre confesses the reality of porousness and but writes from buffered status because she is paid to do so. The essay performs the ideology it claims to expose.
Writings lies for money and status does not strike me as an inspiring example of an elite moral education.
The moral education claim was the flattering premise. The essay is the test of the premise. The output reveals what the moral education produced: a critic who can admit the reality of porousness while writing from buffered status, who can name the relentless pressure while pretending to stand outside it, who can confess past delusion while building a new delusion at a higher level. If this is moral education, the term has lost its content.
Three readings of what happened. Literature does not morally educate, and Emre’s opening claim is guild flattery. The essay’s output confirms it. She had twenty years and the best literary training available and still produced a piece that reenacts what Wolfe satirized. Reading Wolfe did not save her from anything Wolfe described.
Or the moral education worked as designed. Elite literary institutions provide a moral education that socializes their alumni into the legitimate forms of self-presentation for the credentialed class. It teaches how to confess porousness in ways that license continued buffered analysis. It teaches the chastened-critic pose. It teaches when to perform humility and when to assert authority. Emre got this education. She uses it well. The product matches the design.
The harshest reading: she got the moral education the university provides, which is socialization into a class of people who launder their privileges through performances of self-awareness. Wolfe spent his career documenting this class. Emre joined it. Her essay is the alumni newsletter.
Pick any of the three. They all reach the same destination. Emre’s moral education claim does not survive contact with the moral education’s product.
Emre writes:
Wolfe has cultivated the myth of Charlotte’s exceptionality for us, and the inhabitants of Sparta have cultivated it within her. Her parents and her teachers, outwardly afraid of sin, cannot see how they have planted it deep in Charlotte’s soul and encouraged it to grow. Her longing for the university is the first sign of her pride—her desire to have her superior character consecrated by “the real Dupont,” where, she believes, she will forget the people of Sparta. “The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them,” Wolfe reports, through her eyes.
This is how communities treat anyone with astonishing gifts.
The basketball player gets praised for basketball. The accountant gets called on for accounting. The smart kid gets praised, encouraged, and pushed toward where smart kids go. This is the normal function of community. It identifies what its members can do well and reinforces them in doing it. Sparta did this for Charlotte. Sparta does this for every kid who shows aptitude in something Sparta values. Emre treats Charlotte’s situation as if Sparta committed some moral error by recognizing her abilities and encouraging them. The encouragement was the system working.
The framing requires religious vocabulary to make ordinary cultivation sound corrupt. “Planted in her soul.” “Pride.” “First sign of her pride.” “Outwardly afraid of sin.” This language imports sin-and-fall categories into a situation that does not need them. A valedictorian wants to attend an elite university. Her parents want her to. Her teachers want her to. No one in Sparta thinks this is a problem. The narrator’s voice that calls it pride is Wolfe doing free indirect style, channeling Charlotte’s internal monologue. Emre reads the narrator’s voice as Wolfe’s moral diagnosis. The reading is technically wrong.
When Wolfe writes “The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them,” that is Charlotte thinking, not Wolfe declaring. Wolfe shows how she thinks. The line is the sort of thing a smart eighteen-year-old tells herself. Wolfe’s irony stays gentle. He shows the thought. He does not endorse it and does not denounce it. Emre converts the shown thought into an authorial judgment. She needs the judgment because her reading requires Charlotte’s exceptionalism to be moral fault rather than measurable fact.
Charlotte is valedictorian. She is a Presidential Scholar. She is going to an elite university while her classmates stay in Sparta. By every metric communities use to assess intellectual performance, Charlotte outperforms her community. The thought “I exist on a plane above them” reads as arrogant in tone and accurate in content. Emre treats the accuracy as if it were the arrogance. The two are separate questions. Charlotte can be both accurate and prideful. She can also be accurate without pride. Emre collapses the distinction.
Underneath the framing sits a particular elite progressive assumption: ambition and meritocratic striving are inherently corrupting. Wanting to leave your community is suspect. Wanting to rise is pride. Cultivating exceptional gifts is selfish. Letting the kid leave the river town is communal sin. This view exists. It is not universal. Sparta does not hold it. From Sparta’s perspective, sending the valedictorian to Dupont is a triumph. The community celebrates her. The teachers feel rewarded. The parents feel proud. Charlotte’s pride sustains the effort she needs to make the trip work. The whole town cheers her on the day she leaves.
Emre writes as if everyone agrees that pride and ambition are bad. Most communities do not. Most people do not. The literary critical class pretends to. The framing assumes consensus that does not exist outside the small group Emre writes for.
The essay is a performance of horror at ordinary human motivation.
The list of normal things Emre treats as charged: people want recognition, communities cultivate their talented members, smart kids leave small towns, college students drink and have sex and chase status, strivers strive, ambition motivates effort, recognition feels good, sex happens, alcohol gets consumed, people adapt to environments. None of these should shock anyone. All of these are how human beings have always lived.
But the essay treats each as charged, fatal, tragic, corrupting. “Fatal desire.” “Relentless pressure.” “Surrender.” “Tragic.” “Naïveté.” “Self-importance.” “Pure of heart.” “Squalor.” The vocabulary maintains a sustained tone of horror at things that should not horrify anyone who has lived.
So either she is pretending or she has lost the ability to see straight. Both options reflect badly.
The performance reading: Emre cannot be shocked. She is forty. She teaches at Wesleyan. She has watched two decades of students drink, hook up, chase status, and graduate. She knows how universities function. She knows what motivates her colleagues. Her own career was built on the same drives she now finds tragic in fictional characters. The shock is theater. The theater serves several functions. It positions her as morally sensitive. It signals membership in the class of people who can be shocked by normalcy. It performs the literary critic’s role, which requires the pose of someone who sees what others miss. It launders her own participation by signaling distance from what she does. The NYRB audience pays for this theater because the theater is what the publication sells.
The deformation reading: she has spent enough time in literary moralizing that the moralism has become her perception. She cannot see normal motivation as normal anymore. Her training taught her to see ambition as sin and recognition-seeking as fatal, and the training stuck. The performance became the person. She is not pretending. She is what the training made her.
The third reading is the saddest: both at once. She started performing because the role required it. The performance became the perception. The mask became the face. This is what institutional life does. People who keep playing the part for long enough turn into the part.
Wolfe documented this throughout his career. He wrote about radical chic patrons performing solidarity until they could not distinguish the performance from belief. He wrote about masters of the universe performing concern until they could not distinguish the concern from the calculation. He wrote about journalists performing objectivity until they could not see the bias. Emre’s essay is the literary critic’s version. She performs horror at ordinary motivation until the horror feels real to her. The product is the essay you just read.
Whether the horror is cynical or sincere does not change the diagnosis. The horror is wrong. Normal human motivation is not horrifying. It is what makes civilization run. Emre’s essay treats the engine as the pathology. Wolfe spent his career insisting the engine is the engine.
Emre presents herself as the girl who could not afford the book, who read it on the bookstore floor, who came from somewhere humble enough to identify with Charlotte’s situation. The autobiographical setup positions her as a striver. Her biography reveals she struck out from that humble origin and arrived at Harvard undergrad, Yale PhD, Oxford professorship, and a regular byline at the New York Review of Books. She made the same journey as Charlotte. She arrived at a more credentialed destination than Charlotte ever reaches in the novel. And she writes from that destination condemning anyone who makes the journey.
Three logical options.
Either her striving was good and Charlotte’s was bad. Then Emre owes the reader an account of what distinguishes them. She does not provide one. Charlotte is exceptional, ambitious, leaves a small town for an elite university, joins the right social groups, adapts to the environment. Emre did the same. The essay names no principle that separates the two paths.
Or both were bad. Then Emre should give back the credentials, resign the position, return to wherever she came from. She has not done this. The condemnation does not extend to her own case.
Or both were normal. Then the essay’s moral framing collapses. Striving for elite credentials and social position is what humans do who can do it. Sparta encouraged Charlotte to do it. Emre’s family and teachers encouraged her to do it. The encouragement worked. The encouraged child became the credentialed adult. No tragedy. No fall. No corruption. The system worked as designed.
The essay relies on the reader not noticing the contradiction. Emre wants the reader to identify with her against Charlotte. But the identification only works if you accept Emre’s premise that her path was different from Charlotte’s. The premise is not defended. The essay assumes the reader grants it.
Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) named this move the revolt of the elites. The new elite class secures its position and then attacks the values that produced its position. The attack is a class signal. It distinguishes the higher elite from the lower middle class that still believes in striving. Emre belongs to this class. The essay is its standard product. Climb the ladder. Pull the ladder up. Write an essay denouncing ladders.
Wolfe spent his career documenting people who use their hard-won positions to denounce the position-seeking that got them there. Radical chic patrons. Limousine liberals. The journalist who attacks the institutions she works inside. Emre’s essay is the literary critic’s version. She got everything Charlotte wants and uses her vantage point to suggest Charlotte should not want it.
The honest version of the essay defends her own striving as good or apologizes for it as bad. She does neither. She just performs horror at striving in fictional form while continuing her own striving in real life. The pose is incoherent.
Emre writes:
When I am Charlotte Simmons was first published in 2004, it seemed impossible to set aside his conservative politics, his outrageous persona, and, quite simply, his age—he had just turned seventy-four—and imagine him proclaiming, “I am Charlotte Simmons.”
No normal reader had this problem. Only someone in Merv Emre’s elite social set had this reaction.
Wolfe‘s conservatism is mostly aesthetic. He criticized modernist architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House. He criticized modernist art in The Painted Word. He defended American achievement in The Right Stuff. He voted Republican and dined with George W. Bush. None of this makes him a conservative intellectual in the William F. Buckley (1925-2008) or Russell Kirk (1918-1994) sense. He did not write political polemic. He did not edit a conservative magazine. He did not advance a policy agenda. He was an American satirist who happened to vote Republican, the way Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American satirist who voted whatever way Twain voted. His method was status realism applied to every group he wrote about: stock car drivers, astronauts, acid heads, Black Panthers, bond traders, college students, Miami immigrants. He skewered everyone. The political reading exists. It overstates his ideological commitment.
Emre projects her literary class’s hangups onto a general reading public that did not share them. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Those readers picked it up because they wanted to read a Tom Wolfe novel about college life. They did not need to set aside his politics, his persona, or his age. They were not embarrassed to read him. They just read the book.
The framing creates a manufactured obstacle for Emre to overcome. The setup goes: “Wolfe’s conservative politics, his outrageous persona, and his age make it hard to imagine him saying ‘I am Charlotte Simmons.'” The implied next move: “But here is how we can imagine it, by reading him as Flaubertian.” The obstacle exists so the achievement of overcoming it can be announced. Emre is doing literary critic work, which requires obstacles to overcome. If the obstacles do not exist she has to manufacture them.
Look at the components. The white suit. Yes, distinctive. Not an obstacle to reading the book. The Republican voting. Yes, on record. Not an obstacle to reading the book. The age. Yes, 74. Not an obstacle to reading the book. Novelists write past 70. Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein at 85. Philip Roth wrote into his late seventies. Updike, McCarthy, Naipaul all kept writing late. Inhabiting young characters at 74 is what novelists do. Tolstoy (1828-1910) was 76 when he wrote Hadji Murat. Hardy (1840-1928) wrote poetry into his eighties.
So the obstacles Emre names are obstacles for her literary class, not for the reading public. The general reader buys the book, reads the book, has opinions about the book. The literary critic has to first establish that reading the book is difficult because the author is conservative or old or wears strange clothes, then overcome the difficulty through superior critical technique. The work of the essay is producing the difficulty so the critic can perform the overcoming.
Wolfe satirized this exact move. The avant-garde critic who needs to make routine appreciation look difficult so the critic’s apparatus can appear necessary. He named this move in The Painted Word.
Emre writes:
What James Wood decried as the “enormous excitability” of Wolfe’s prose—his crowded sentences, his noisy passion for italics, exclamation marks, ellipses, and capital letters—threatened to drown out the distinctive thoughts of his characters. By accident, this style proved better suited to representing college students than any of Wolfe’s other subjects.
Has Emre read anything else by Tom Wolfe?
This is the silliest claim in the essay.
The Wolfe style is the Wolfe style. Italics, exclamation marks, ellipses, capital letters, crowded sentences, free indirect style, status-anxious interior monologue, vivid descriptive prose. He used this style for test pilots in The Right Stuff (1979). He used it for acid heads in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). He used it for stock car driver Junior Johnson (1931-2019) in "The Last American Hero" (1965). He used it for bond traders in Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). He used it for Atlanta plutocrats in A Man in Full (1998). He used it for Miami immigrants in Back to Blood. The style worked in every case because the subject was status-anxious humans operating at high intensity. College students are one example. They are not the example.
The claim that the style suited college students better than astronauts is hard to defend on any axis. Test pilots in The Right Stuff push aircraft to Mach 2 and die in flames if they get it wrong. The stakes are higher. The status pyramid is steeper. The performance demands are more extreme. Wolfe’s noise fits Chuck Yeager (1923-2020) breaking the sound barrier as well as it fits Hoyt and Vance walking through the Grove. Possibly better. Bonfire’s trading floor is louder than any frat party. McCoy’s panic when he hits Henry Lamb runs more frantic than Charlotte’s deflowering. Atlanta’s Croker pushing through his real estate empire while his life collapses gives Wolfe at least as much to work with as Dupont’s freshmen.
The “by accident” framing is wrong. Wolfe was deliberate. He picked his subjects. He picked them because they fit his style. He did not stumble onto college students and discover his prose had been waiting for them. He sought out high-energy status environments for forty years because that is what his prose required.
Either Emre has read only I am Charlotte Simmons among Wolfe’s books and cannot honestly make this comparison, or she has read more and noticed the consistency, which makes the “by accident” claim dishonest. Pick one.
The deeper move in her sentence: she needs the style to work in I am Charlotte Simmons in a special way so her recuperation of the novel has a craft argument. Wood made a general attack on Wolfe’s prose. Emre cannot defend Wolfe’s prose in general because then she has to defend it against the Wood critique. So she carves out a special case for this novel. The prose is bad in general but accidentally good here. The maneuver lets her keep Wood’s verdict on most of Wolfe while rescuing one book. It is a critic’s dodge.
A more honest move: Wolfe’s style is what it is, Wood overstated his case, the prose works on its own terms for the subjects Wolfe chose, and I am Charlotte Simmons is one application of the style, not its unique destination. But that defense requires Emre to disagree with Wood. She does not disagree with Wood. Wood is the higher status critic. She does not contradict higher status critics.
Emre writes: “It was as if, in the figure of the drunk, arrogant boy marveling at his own reflection, Wolfe had finally found the emblem of his style.”
Wolfe’s style was fully formed by the late 1960s. The The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test shows the mature Wolfe. Forty years of major work follow. Then in his fourteenth or fifteenth book he finally finds the emblem of the style he wrote for half a century. The timeline does not work.
Pick any number of Wolfe scenes that better serve as emblems. Ken Kesey (1935-2001) on the bus tripping with his Pranksters. Chuck Yeager nursing the X-1 through Mach 1 with broken ribs. Sherman McCoy hitting Henry Lamb on the Bronx expressway. Junior Johnson running moonshine through North Carolina back roads. Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) entertaining Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex. Any of these scenes carries more Wolfe DNA than a drunk freshman looking in a mirror. The mirror scene is fine. It is not the emblem.
The “finally found” framing exposes Emre’s project. She wrote an introduction for a new edition of I am Charlotte Simmons. The introduction needs to make a case for the book’s importance. The easiest way to make the case is to claim the book sits at the top of Wolfe’s hierarchy. So Emre invents a narrative where Wolfe spent his career building toward this novel and discovered his signature moment inside it. The narrative serves the introduction. It does not describe the career.
The hierarchy of Wolfe’s books, as readers and most critics see it, puts The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities ahead of I am Charlotte Simmons. Emre inverts the consensus to make her introduction carry more weight. If she is introducing the book Wolfe was building toward for fifty years, her introduction is more important than if she is introducing his eleventh-best book.
This is the standard introduction-writer’s move. The book I am introducing is the most important book by this author. Every introduction makes some version of this claim. Most readers see through it. The “emblem of his style” formulation is just a fancier version of “this is the great book.”
The mirror scene works as Emre uses it. The drunk boy seeing himself with detachment, the first person looking through two pairs of eyes, the free indirect setup. Fine reading of the scene. The leap from “this scene illustrates free indirect style” to “this scene is the emblem of Wolfe’s fifty-year career” requires evidence the essay does not provide. The leap performs rhetoric. It does not deliver analysis.
Wolfe’s career has many candidate emblems. The man in the white suit. The phrase “the right stuff.” The radical chic title. The italicized Status! repeated through the trading floor scenes. The frat boy in the mirror is one candidate among many. Emre picks it for this introduction. The career does not point to this scene.
Emre writes: “If adopting Flaubert’s narrative technique was relatively straightforward, then adapting the plot of Madame Bovary—a provincial woman with outsized social ambitions is seduced and ruined—posed a challenge.”
The borrowing claim collapses on inspection.
The plot of “provincial young person comes to elite environment with ambitions and faces seduction” is not Flaubert’s plot. It is the universal novel-of-ambition plot. Every major literary tradition has versions. Stendhal (1783-1842) wrote Julien Sorel into Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830. Balzac (1799-1850) wrote Lucien de Rubempré into Lost Illusions in the 1830s. Dickens (1812-1870) wrote Pip into Great Expectations in 1861. Hardy wrote Tess into Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 1891. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) wrote Sister Carrie in 1900 and Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy in 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) wrote This Side of Paradise about Princeton in 1920 and The Great Gatsby in 1925. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote Lily Bart into The House of Mirth in 1905. The provincial-comes-to-elite-environment-and-falls plot is older than Flaubert.
Saying Wolfe borrowed it from Flaubert is like saying every restaurant that serves chicken borrowed the menu from KFC. The plot is common property. Singling out one source as the model requires evidence Wolfe drew on that source. No such evidence exists. Wolfe himself did not claim Madame Bovary as his model. He mentioned it because Charlotte reads it in the novel. The mention is a Wolfe game, not a confession of source.
The sources for I am Charlotte Simmons sit closer to home. Wolfe’s own reporting on college campuses. The American provincial-at-elite-college plot is well established before Wolfe wrote. Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) wrote The Group about Vassar graduates in 1963. Erich Segal (1937-2010) wrote Love Story at Harvard in 1970. Henry James (1843-1916) and Theodore Dreiser and John O'Hara (1905-1970) handled provincial-to-elite transitions for a century. Journalism about hookup culture by writers like Caitlin Flanagan (b. 1961) ran in the major magazines through the 1990s and 2000s. Wolfe had American models available without crossing the Atlantic.
The Madame Bovary framing serves Emre’s elevation project. She wants Wolfe inside the literary canon at the highest level. Flaubert is the highest level. So she connects them. The connection runs through the plot. But the plot is not Flaubert’s. It is everyone’s. The elevation works only if you accept the false attribution.
The framing also makes Wolfe sound derivative. He sounds like an American satirist drawing on a European master. Wolfe was not derivative. He was a confident American voice working in American materials. He took his subjects from American life and his style from his own decades of journalism. Calling him a Madame Bovary adapter makes him a junior partner in the literary enterprise. Wolfe was a senior partner. The framing demotes him to elevate him, which is incoherent.
Last problem. Emre’s description of the Madame Bovary plot does not fit Charlotte. Madame Bovary is seduced and dies. Charlotte joins a sorority and becomes a popular girlfriend. Emma Bovary takes arsenic and convulses through her last hours. Charlotte sits in the basketball arena clicking on the appropriate face. The arcs do not match. Emma’s story ends in literal death. Charlotte’s story ends in social rebirth. The plot Emre claims Wolfe adapted is not the plot Wolfe wrote.
Three failures in one sentence. The plot is not Flaubert’s. Wolfe did not borrow from Flaubert. The plot does not match the book Wolfe wrote. The Madame Bovary framing fails on every axis.
Emre writes: “For Wolfe to stand a chance in 2004, he had to convince the reader that there was something at stake in our heroine’s chastity. He had to make us believe that our heroine was just that—a heroine, beautiful, blameless, and unworldly to the point of stupidity.”
The framing is bogus and overwrought on several axes.
“For Wolfe to stand a chance” puts a multi-millionaire bestselling author in a position of struggle. Wolfe had no struggle in 2004. He commanded a massive audience. His previous books had sold millions of copies between them. Picador paid for this introduction because his name still moves books. The phrasing positions Wolfe as a writer fighting for survival when he was a writer at the top of his commercial reach.
“Something at stake in our heroine’s chastity” assumes a 2004 reader who finds chastity weightless. The assumption is false. Plenty of readers in 2004 cared about sexual ethics. Catholics. Evangelicals. Orthodox Jews. Mormons. Mainline Protestants. Many secular readers as well, for non-religious reasons. The American reading public in 2004 was not uniformly post-chastity. Emre projects a hyper-secular literary critic onto the whole audience and then announces Wolfe had to overcome the projection.
“He had to make us believe that our heroine was just that—a heroine, beautiful, blameless, and unworldly to the point of stupidity.” Novelists do not have to make readers believe their characters are what the novel says they are. Novelists write characters. Readers accept the writing or do not. Wolfe wrote Charlotte as beautiful, ambitious, intellectually capable, and naive about social mores. He did not have to convince anyone of anything. He just wrote.
“Unworldly to the point of stupidity” is Emre’s projection, not the book’s portrait. Charlotte is not stupid. She is the valedictorian and Presidential Scholar from her high school. She reads Madame Bovary. She studies neuroscience. She thinks about evolutionary biology. She executes a sophisticated social campaign to win back social standing after her hookup. The book gives her interior life with detail and care. Calling her stupid is a critic’s contempt for the character. The book does not call her stupid.
The “in 2004” framing assumes 2004 was uniquely hostile to chastity narratives. It was not. The 1990s had Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City. The 1990s also had The Rules and the True Love Waits movement. Sexual ethics were contested terrain in 2004 as they are now. Wolfe was writing into an audience that included plenty of readers ready to find Charlotte’s loss of virginity consequential. He did not need to convince them. He just had to write the book.
Wolfe gave Emre the framing in his “Hooking Up” essay. He wrote that a Tolstoy or Flaubert “wouldn’t have stood a chance in the United States” in 2000. Emre takes this seriously. Wolfe said it rhetorically. He then wrote the book and succeeded with it. The book’s success refutes the framing Wolfe deployed in the essay. Emre uses the essay framing without noticing the book refutes it.
The deeper move positions Emre as the sophisticated reader who understands obstacles Wolfe faced. The framing implies Wolfe had to overcome modern skepticism with clever literary technique. Emre’s reader is supposed to feel advanced for noticing what stood between Wolfe and success. But the difficulty is manufactured. Wolfe sold the book. Readers responded. The hookup culture conversation in 2004 was active and contested, and many readers took sexual ethics seriously. No clever workaround was required. The framing flatters the literary critical class by pretending its outlook represents the public’s outlook. The public’s outlook is more various than that.
Emre writes:
Adam, whose language is more florid and, in turn, more repulsive, admires the “absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty” of her face: “It was opening, opening, opening like the tender virginal bud of the most gorgeous flower revealing its virginal petals to the world with a sublime innocence and at the same time a sublime invitation.”
That is how many young men think. Wolfe captures this. Some men attach a premium to the possibility of sex with virginal women. Why is this repulsive?
Adam is a virginal nerd in his first major crush. The free indirect passage shows his interior monologue. Florid, over-the-top, mixing sexual and innocent imagery, treating his beloved as both holy and erotic. This is the standard texture of young male romantic obsession. Wolfe gets it right. The accuracy is the achievement.
The “tender virginal bud” imagery has a long literary history. Flower-as-female-sexuality goes back centuries. Adam thinks in inherited language because that is the language available to a literary-minded young man in love. Wolfe shows Adam thinking in this language. He does not endorse the language. He records it.
Emre calls the passage “repulsive.” She reacts to the content of Adam’s mind. The craft of the writing is a separate question. The same critical error appears throughout the essay. Emre confuses the character’s voice with the author’s endorsement.
The repulsion is also feminist-coded in a familiar way. Male desire articulated in detail gets called “repulsive” because it is male desire articulated in detail. The flowering-bud imagery does not strike anyone as repulsive in a Renaissance sonnet or a Romantic poem. It draws the repulsed reaction only when located in the head of a 21st-century young male character. The criticism targets the location. The imagery has a long literary lineage.
The novelist’s job is showing how people think. Wolfe shows how Adam thinks. Adam thinks this way because young men in love think this way. Emre wants Adam to think differently, or for Wolfe to make Adam think differently. But Wolfe is not in the business of producing model young men with reformed gazes. He is in the business of showing what young men are. Adam is florid. Adam is nerdy. Adam mixes sexual and reverent imagery. Adam is a 19-year-old virgin in love with an unattainable beautiful classmate. Wolfe writes him as he is.
The passage succeeds as characterization. The reader who finds Adam’s thoughts uncomfortable is responding to Wolfe’s accurate portrait of this young man. The discomfort is the point. Adam’s love letters from his head might embarrass him if anyone saw them. The novel makes us see them. That is what novels are for.
Emre writes:
We continue to believe in her worthiness even as Wolfe lets us glimpse her deficiencies. There is her pride, her vanity. There is her puritanism and what it conceals—a fascination with the flesh so intense that, were it ever to surface, it would force her to admit that she, Charlotte Simmons, was as hungry for sex as any sorority girl and as misogynistic as any frat boy in her derision of this desire.
The passage is bogus on several axes.
Pride and vanity get treated as moral deficiencies. They are normal traits in an 18-year-old high achiever. Charlotte is the valedictorian. She has earned her good opinion of herself. Calling pride and vanity “deficiencies” requires a moral framework Emre does not defend. Most readers do not share the framework. Pride and vanity are how the high-achieving young experience their achievements.
“Puritanism” is used pejoratively. Charlotte is not a Puritan. She is a young woman with intact sexual ethics from her religious small town. Calling this puritanism frames her ethics as pathological. The framing assumes everyone agrees that sexual restraint is a disease. Not everyone agrees. Most religious traditions and many secular traditions treat sexual restraint as a virtue. The “puritanism” charge presumes the literary critical class’s view as the default.
The hidden-libido reading is the major problem. Emre claims Charlotte conceals “a fascination with the flesh so intense that, were it ever to surface, it would force her to admit she was as hungry for sex as any sorority girl.” Where is the evidence? Charlotte is interested in sex the way normal young people are interested in sex. She is not hiding a wild secret libido. The novel does not give us a Charlotte boiling with concealed lust. It gives us a Charlotte with normal curiosity and traditional ethics. Emre invents the hidden hunger because she needs Charlotte to be equivalent to the sorority girls. Without the equivalence, the moral architecture of the novel becomes more complex than Emre’s reading allows.
The “misogynistic as any frat boy” charge is the central move. Charlotte calls her roommate Beverly a slut. Emre calls this misogyny. But Charlotte’s judgment of Beverly is not hatred of women. It is moral evaluation of Beverly’s behavior. Charlotte finds Beverly’s hookups degrading. She holds Beverly to a standard. The standard does not demand female silence and subservience. The standard asks for sexual integrity. Calling the application of this standard misogyny is the contemporary academic move where any negative female judgment of female behavior gets recoded as internalized patriarchy. The move requires us to believe Charlotte’s disgust at Beverly’s actions is hatred of women in general. That belief is unsupported.
Charlotte’s moral seriousness is the thing Emre cannot allow. If Charlotte has moral judgments about sex and they differ from Beverly’s, then Charlotte represents a moral alternative in the novel. Emre’s reading needs everyone to be the same underneath. So Charlotte’s morality has to be hypocritical, her judgment has to be misogyny, her chastity has to conceal slut hunger. The flattening is the agenda.
Wolfe does not flatten Charlotte. He shows her as morally serious, ambitious, intellectually proud, and naive about social mores. He gives her interior life with detail and respect. He lets her think “slut” about Beverly without diagnosing the thought. He records what she thinks. He does not call her misogynistic or hypocritical. Emre adds the diagnoses.
The Freudian/Foucauldian assumption underneath the passage: surface morality conceals what it forbids. The puritan secretly wants what she condemns. This model is old. It is also unproven. Some people who hold sexual ethics hold them because they believe them. The hermeneutics of suspicion treats every moral claim as a mask. Sometimes a moral claim is just a moral claim.
Emre’s passage performs critical sophistication. The sophistication consists of finding hidden flaws underneath surface virtues. The reader is supposed to nod at the depth of the reading. The reading has no depth. It just substitutes a leveling framework for the book’s moral architecture.
Emre writes: “It is hard for people who see this novel as a story of sexual morality to realize that Charlotte and her suitors are more alike than they seem.”
Who finds this hard? Who reads the book as a story of sexual morality? It’s about certain people in a certain situation dealing with certain challenges, including sex.
Emre writes:
All four are willful class traitors, outsiders who have worked hard to become insiders only to realize that what the university promised them—cultural ennoblement and social uplift, a comfortable middle-class existence as a banker or a writer or a professor at a university like Dupont—is, in fact, a mirage, shimmering and inaccessible on the East Coast.
“Class traitor” is European Marxist vocabulary. It comes from the tradition where the working class is supposed to have revolutionary solidarity and members who join the bourgeoisie betray their class. The framing makes sense in early 20th-century Europe with strong class consciousness and revolutionary politics. It does not fit America. American culture celebrates social mobility. The kid who leaves Sparta and makes it to Dupont is a hometown hero. His parents brag about him at church. His teachers put his picture on the wall. His siblings tell their friends about his college. The “class traitor” framing imports an alien sensibility into American material that does not support it.
Who in America talks like this? Academic Marxists. Cultural studies professors. The Verso Books crowd. Almost nobody outside the small left-wing academic milieu uses “class traitor” to describe upward mobility. The characters in the novel do not describe themselves this way. Their parents do not. Their teachers do not. Their employers do not. The framing is Emre’s imposition on the material.
The “cultural ennoblement and social uplift” language is also off. American universities do not promise cultural ennoblement. That is the older European model of the university as a Bildung institution. The American university promises career credentials, networks, and access to elite life. It promises a job and a contact list. The students at Dupont understand this. So do their parents. The promise is not cultural ennoblement that fails to materialize. The promise is a credential and a network that the characters get.
The “mirage” claim is the deeper problem. Emre asserts that middle-class life is “a mirage, shimmering and inaccessible” for these characters. Where does this come from? The novel shows none of them failing. Hoyt graduates and enters finance through fraternity connections. JoJo continues as a basketball player with academic support. Adam writes prize-winning articles for the campus paper. Charlotte becomes a popular sorority girl with the star athlete as a boyfriend. The middle-class destination is not inaccessible to them. It is already in their grasp at the end of freshman year. They will reach it. The book gives no indication otherwise.
The “comfortable middle-class existence as a banker or a writer or a professor” line also blurs categories. A Wall Street banker is upper class, often rich. A Dupont professor is upper-middle-class. A writer ranges across class lines. Lumping these together as “comfortable middle-class” makes the destination sound modest so the failure to reach it is more poignant. The destination is not modest. Hoyt’s Wall Street job pays multiples of national median income. Calling that middle-class is uninformed or strategic.
Emre’s thesis requires the characters to be betrayed by the system. If they succeed at the system’s terms, the system is delivering what it promised. If they fail, the system is the villain. Emre needs the failure narrative for her critique. So she asserts a failure the book does not show. She calls them class traitors when their communities celebrate them. She calls the middle-class life a mirage when it sits right in front of them.
The book shows characters who get exactly what they came for. The cost is moral. The material outcome is success. Charlotte becomes socially adapted, popular, and dissembling. The book shows this and does not call it failure. Emre calls it failure because her framework requires the call. The framework precedes the reading.
Wolfe wrote about American social mobility for fifty years. He understood it as the engine of American life. He satirized its excesses but did not deny its existence. His characters strive and often succeed. Failure happens but is not the structural truth of American social life. Emre imposes a European leftist frame of doomed mobility on Wolfe’s American material. The frame does not fit.
Emre writes:
They struggle to make sense of their ferocious resentments, the fear that they will be denied their rightful rewards because the university has failed to do what it was supposed to: separate the best and most deserving from the rest of society. And so the ugliest tendencies—racist paranoia, sexism, contempt for the working class—are seeded in the brightest minds. I am Charlotte Simmons makes no attempt to predict the future, but twenty years after its publication we can well imagine how these tendencies will grow into a noxious strain of elite conservatism, how this naked resentment will cover itself with the “new sets of values” propounded by the governor of California, caught with his pants down in the Grove. We can even imagine, in 2025, one of these characters, maybe Charlotte Simmons herself, serving as vice-president of the United States.
The passage is overwrought because the underlying observation is mundane.
People feel resentment when they think they have been denied rewards they earned. People want their group to win. People develop suspicion of out-groups. People hold contempt for those they consider beneath them. These are universal human tendencies. They appear in every population, every era, every political coalition. Universities do not seed them. They emerge from how humans evolved as social primates.
Emre dramatizes the ordinary. “Ferocious resentments.” “Naked resentment.” “Ugliest tendencies.” “Noxious strain.” The vocabulary makes normal human emotion sound like extraordinary moral failure. The pitch is wrong for the material. Wolfe wrote social satire about status anxiety. Emre rewrites it as moral tragedy about elite formation. The genre shift is the move.
Two objections.
The “rightful rewards” framing treats Charlotte’s sense of earning her place as pathological. Charlotte earned her place. She is valedictorian. She is Presidential Scholar. She studied hard and produced results. She won admission to Dupont by work. Calling her sense of deserving rewards “resentment” denies the work that produced the deserving. She has no paranoia about denial. She has earned what she has and feels accordingly.
The “racist paranoia, sexism, contempt for the working class” list assumes these tendencies flow only rightward. They do not. The progressive academic class holds its own racial paranoia (everything is white supremacy), its own sexism (toxic masculinity, men as problem), and its own contempt for the working class (deplorables, white trash, flyover country). Emre treats these tendencies as right-coded sins when they appear across the political spectrum. Every coalition has its racial fears, its gender contempt, and its class disdain. Emre names the right’s versions while ignoring the left’s identical patterns.
The “noxious strain of elite conservatism” framing also requires us to redraw the political map. Critics have usually painted conservatives as non-elite. The rural poor. The working class. The deplorables. Now Emre frames them as elite. The reframing serves the Vance prediction. JD Vance went to Yale Law and works in finance and politics. He is elite. So contemporary conservatism gets recoded as elite resentment. The category lets academics keep their attack on right-wingers as low-status while also positioning them as the dominant powerful class. The category is incoherent but useful.
The Vance hook at the end is the political payoff. Emre wants the book to predict Vance. The book might bear on Vance the way any novel of class-anxious strivers might bear on any class-anxious striver who later wins power. The connection is loose. Wolfe died in 2018 before Vance reached national office. Wolfe did not write Vance. The connection is the presentist hook NYRB editors require for introductions to twenty-year-old books. It serves the essay’s purpose. It is not insight.
The deeper problem with the passage: it treats normal human nature as if it were the special pathology of one political faction. Resentment is universal. Status anxiety is universal. In-group preference is universal. The characters at Dupont feel these things because humans feel these things. They will feel them as conservatives or progressives, as bankers or professors, as Republicans or Democrats. The university does not seed these tendencies. Sparta has them. Dupont has them. The literary critical class has them. They are how humans operate.
Wolfe understood this. He wrote about resentment and status anxiety in every group he covered. Acid heads. Astronauts. Bond traders. Black activists. Limousine liberals. Stock car drivers. He showed the universal pattern. He did not claim it flowed only into Republican politics. Emre’s prediction narrows what Wolfe documented widely.
The overwrought language is a substitute for the harder argument Emre does not make. The harder argument: why is normal human resentment special when it appears on the right and ignorable when it appears on the left? Emre does not answer the question. She just keeps the dramatic vocabulary in place and hopes the reader does not notice.
Emre writes:
Reading it today, I find that I am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel, not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity.
Wolfe’s novel is realistic about human nature. Emre calls it pessimistic. The label is wrong. Realistic and pessimistic are not the same thing. People are status-seeking social primates. They form coalitions. They want recognition. They adapt to their environments. They conform to group expectations. This is how humans operate. Wolfe portrays this accurately. Emre calls accuracy pessimism because she wants humans to be something other than what they are.
The “refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system” line gives the game away. Why would a character be released from his environment? Characters in realist fiction are products of their environments because people are products of their environments. The release Emre wants is not available in nature. She asks Wolfe to write fantasy and calls his realism pessimistic when he refuses.
Humans evolved as status-hierarchical social animals. We seek position because seeking position improved reproductive outcomes for our ancestors. The drive for status is not a moral failure. It is biology. Universities do not create it. Sparta has it. Dupont has it. Yale has it. Oxford has it. The savanna had it. The desire to belong, to be recognized, to outrank rivals, runs through every human population that researchers have studied. Emre’s sustained horror at these drives is horror at the species.
“I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance” tells you what is happening. She admits the belief is a preference. She likes to believe something. She does not claim to know it. She chooses optimism against the evidence she has watched accumulate over a decade of teaching. The choice is faith. The evidence does not earn it.
The “quest for social dominance” phrasing also misframes the activity. Normal status seeking is not domination. It is the universal human concern with position, recognition, and belonging. Calling it dominance makes it sound aggressive and pathological when it is sociality. People want their efforts noticed. People want their gifts recognized. People want their place in the group. These are the basic facts of social existence. They are not “quests for dominance.”
The “self-protective” hedge admits the problem. Emre senses her optimism does not survive scrutiny. So she labels it self-protective and moves on. The hedge is honest about the motivation but does not change the picture. The picture remains: she has watched ten years of college students confirm Wolfe’s portrait, and she chooses to believe otherwise. She wills the choice. The evidence does not earn it.
“Agitates and excites me once more” is performative. Critics signal renewed engagement with the books they introduce. The reader is supposed to feel the critic’s pulse quicken. Emre’s pulse may or may not quicken. The performance is required either way.
Wolfe wrote about humans as humans are: status-anxious, coalition-forming, environment-shaped, sex-driven, position-conscious. The accuracy was the achievement. Calling accuracy pessimism is the move of someone who needs reality to be different from what it is.
Emre is at war with reality and losing. She wants humans to be something other than what biology made them. The realism of Wolfe is the obstacle. So she labels his realism pessimism and proceeds with her hopes intact. Hopes intact and reality unchanged.
Emre teaches college students. She has watched the patterns Wolfe describes for over a decade. The evidence supports Wolfe. She chooses to believe against the evidence because believing against the evidence is part of her professional identity. Literary critics are supposed to hope for human transcendence of the social order. Hoping for it does not make it happen. The hoping is the job. Wolfe declined the job.
Emre’s essay hits every mark the literary critical class scores for. The autobiographical opening that places her as both humble striver and wise critic. The recuperation project rescuing a previously dismissed writer for the canon. The Flaubert comparison elevating the work into the European tradition. The class reading that gives the analysis a politically respectable lens. The Vance hook providing the presentist payoff that 2025 readers expect. The moralistic framing treating normal human behavior as tragic indictment. The hedge at the end performing critical humility. The free indirect style discussion deploying technical literary apparatus.
These are the moves that signal membership. Each one tells the reader: I am one of you. I do what we do. Peers praise the essay because praising it confirms their own positions. If Emre’s framework holds, their frameworks also hold. If her framework collapses, their frameworks also become suspect. Mutual praise is mutual self-defense.
Picador publishes this as the introduction because Picador wants the imprimatur of a respected academic critic. The introduction is a marketing tool. It signals to literary readers that the book is worth taking seriously. Emre’s name does the work. The analytical quality of the introduction is a secondary consideration. The credentialed name is the asset.
The system runs on credentialed signaling, not on truth. It rewards people who can perform the right moves. Most participants do not notice the substitution because they sit inside the system performing the moves they were trained to perform.
This is what Wolfe satirized for fifty years. The Painted Word documents the art world version. The Right Stuff documents the test-pilot version. Bonfire of the Vanities documents the Wall Street version. The literary critical version operates by the same logic. The class praises its members for performing the class’s preferred moves. The praise reinforces the class’s position. The class membership produces the praise.
Wolfe’s own dismissal in 2004 followed this pattern. The literary critical class dismissed him because dismissing him was the class move at the time. He was too commercial, too popular, too conservative, too old, too dandy. The dismissal worked as class signaling. Twenty years later, the class needs to rehabilitate him because rehabilitating dismissed conservative writers serves a new political purpose. So Emre rehabilitates him. The analysis follows the class’s current needs.
The system is sealed. External critique does not penetrate. Your blog can document what is wrong with the Emre essay. Other independent writers can do the same. The literary critical class will not read this critique. The class talks to itself. NYRB readers are mostly other literary academics. Emre’s introduction will reach a few thousand people. Most of them will praise it because praising it is the class move. The praise will appear in the Times Literary Supplement and Bookforum and the London Review of Books. The praise will not engage with the substantive errors.
The deeper point: the literary critical class is a small status hierarchy that uses publications like NYRB and Picador to credential its members and certify their work. The work has to perform the class’s preferred moves. Truth is not the criterion. Class membership is the criterion. Emre’s essay succeeds at class membership. Its substantive errors are secondary.
Wolfe documented this exact pattern for fifty years. Now the pattern documents him.
Wolfe wrote about race patterns and group behavior more frequently and more frankly than any of his peers, and he kept doing it across forty years.
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) showed Black Panthers fawned over by Leonard Bernstein’s set and Black activists working welfare bureaucrats through racial intimidation. Wolfe treated white liberal racial guilt as performance and Black activist behavior as strategy.
Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) gave the Reverend Bacon (an Al Sharpton stand-in), the Bronx courthouse running on racial coalition arithmetic, and the white liberal capitulation in real time.
A Man in Full (1998) put Atlanta’s Black mayor at the center of a racially explosive sexual assault case, with white Southern resentment treated honestly alongside Black political organizing.
I am Charlotte Simmons (2004) showed JoJo’s racial anxiety on the basketball team, the white king fantasy on the court, and the racial composition of elite college athletics.
Back to Blood (2012) took Miami as an ethnic stew of Cuban, Anglo, Black, Haitian, and Russian populations and treated each group with frank attention to behavior patterns and group interests.
Across all five projects Wolfe wrote race as substantive variable in social life. He showed group interests, coalition behavior, and racial performance.
The comparable American novelists either avoided race or treated it through coded characters. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) had Mr. Sammler watch a Black pickpocket and wrote some racial passages with frankness, but mostly through Jewish protagonists observing. Philip Roth (1933-2018) wrote The Human Stain about passing but treated race as identity construction. John Updike (1932-2009) used Skeeter in Rabbit Redux but filtered race through Rabbit’s WASP anxiety. Norman Mailer (1923-2007) mythologized the Black hipster in "The White Negro" but the writing reads as romance more than realism. Joan Didion (1934-2021) handled Cuban-Black-Anglo tension in Miami (1987) before Wolfe got to it, but as one book. Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) did not sustain racial themes. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) and Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) wrote race from inside Black experience.
Globally, two writers match or surpass Wolfe. V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018) wrote about race and ethnicity worldwide with a frankness that put him outside polite literary opinion. His treatment of post-colonial Africa in A Bend in the River and Islamic societies in Among the Believers runs more unflinching than Wolfe’s. Michel Houellebecq (b. 1956) has done similar work on European immigration in Submission and Annihilation.
Within American letters since the civil rights era, Wolfe stands first or close to first. Naipaul is his only clear superior at global scale.
Three qualifications. Wolfe’s race realism ran sociological more than biological. He did not write about cognitive differences. His framework was status, class, ethnic coalition, and behavior patterns. He worked as a status realist first and a race realist within that.
He wrote in a journalistic-comic register that critics dismissed as caricature. Some called him racist for what he wrote. He did not back off. The hostile reviews of Bonfire, Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood were partly about the race material.
He treated race as one variable among many. Class, region, religion, and status anxiety carried as much weight for him as race.
The Charge in the Room: Merve Emre and Randall Collins’s Interaction Rituals
Collins gives us the smallest working part of social life and builds everything from it. Take Durkheim’s (1858-1917) account of the sacred and Goffman’s (1922-1982) close watch on face-to-face encounters, and you get the interaction ritual. It needs four things at once. Bodies in the same place. A barrier that marks who is inside and who is out. A single focus of attention all share. And a common mood that rises as the people fall into rhythm with one another. When these feed each other, the ritual succeeds, and it throws off four products. Solidarity, the felt bond of the group. Emotional energy in the person, a charge of confidence and initiative and the sense of being morally right. Sacred symbols, objects and names that come to stand for the group and that members feel bound to defend. And a morality of righteous anger toward anyone who profanes those symbols. Collins then strings the rituals into chains. A man moves from room to room, gaining or losing emotional energy, drawn toward the encounters that charge him and away from the ones that drain him, and in The Sociology of Philosophies he shows that intellectual standing forms at the dense centers of these networks, where the energy and the attention concentrate.
Read Emre’s authority with that part in hand, and her power turns out to be made in rooms, not in arguments.
Look at the sites. The wood-paneled Harvard hall where she debated whether criticism should be a profession, a hundred and fifty partisans gathered, has all four ingredients in full. Bodies present, a barrier of the initiated, a single focus on the guest of honor, and a shared mood the reporter named a magnetic cult of personality. That is a textbook successful ritual, and its products are what Collins predicts. Solidarity in the room, a charge of emotional energy running into Emre at the center, and the lifting of her name and her verdicts into sacred objects. The New Yorker works the same way at scale, the masthead a barrier only the anointed cross, the readership a congregation primed to a common mood, and publication a rite that pours the institution’s accumulated sacredness onto her judgments. The NYRB podcast is a ritual by design, recurring, focused, bounded, and its title names the congregation outright, her publics. Each episode recharges the bond and the symbols.
What her verdicts carry, then, is emotional energy, not proof. When she rules that one essayist has failed and another has succeeded, the ruling does not work by the force of its reasons. It works because it issues from the center of high-energy rituals, spoken by a person charged with the energy those rituals confer, before people tuned to share the mood. The tone that brooks no disagreement is the sound of a charged performer at a ritual center. The authority is felt as authority because it arrives wrapped in solidarity and energy, and the felt force has nothing to do with whether the judgment is right.
The doctrine supplies the sacred symbols. Serious reading, form and style, unsentimental clarity, and the venerated names, Arendt and Weil and Gaitskill, are the group’s holy objects. To attend to form is to honor them. To write the warm confessional essay is to profane them. This is why her contempt runs hot rather than cool. Collins predicts that the violation of a sacred symbol draws moral anger, not mild correction, and her scorn for the confessional writer has the heat of ritual indignation, the congregation’s fury at the one who defiles the altar.
Emre writes for those who already agree, and ritual is the better word for it than bias. The agreement of her audience is not a flaw in her reasoning. It is an ingredient of the rite. A ritual requires the barrier and the shared mood, and the nodding of the room is the entrainment that lets the energy build. Address a hostile or indifferent hall and the ritual fails, the charge drains, the verdict lands with no force at all. So she must write for the believers, because their shared premise is the precondition of the emotional charge that makes her authority feel solid. The password is the barrier that keeps outsiders out. The recognition is the common focus. The assent is the rhythm. Bias names a defect in an argument. This is the working order of a successful ritual.
Her path reads as a chain, a long climb toward the rooms that charge her most. Harvard, Yale, McGill, Oxford, Wesleyan, the New Yorker, the podcast, the directorship of a center. Collins says every man drifts toward the encounters that raise his energy and toward the hubs where attention pools, and Emre has moved steadily toward the positions that place her at the center, the guest of honor, the host, the director. Her drive to make criticism a profession is, in these terms, an effort to institutionalize the ritual, to build a standing apparatus that reliably produces solidarity, energy, and sacred symbols, and keeps her at its hub.
Emre is a student of how institutions manufacture authority and dress it as neutral competence. Collins’s rituals show her own authority manufactured the same way, charged by position and energy rather than earned by deeper sight. And she prosecutes the confessional writer for the bid to be recognized, to be seen, to belong. Collins shows that her authority rests on that same hunger, the ritual’s gift of membership and energy, sought at the elite hall and the masthead and the microphone. She and the confessor are both energy-seekers. She has found the higher-status rituals and named the lower ones profane, and part of her contempt is the ritual center looking down at the marginal participant whose blog charges no room.
Two limits. Every authority is a ritual product, the warm essayist’s no less than hers, a sound argument in a seminar no less than a verdict in a hall. So the frame does not catch her in something the others escape. It relocates the source of her authority, from the truth of her judgments to the charge of her position, and it does this for everyone. It cannot show a single verdict wrong. A true judgment spoken at a ritual center gets the same charge as a false one, which is the whole point. The frame is silent on quality and loud on the source of the felt force. What it explains is why her rulings feel like findings to those in the room, and why that feeling is no evidence at all that the rulings are right.
The Disinterest That Pays: Merve Emre and Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu built a sociology of taste that leaves almost no room for innocence. Taste is habitus, the body of dispositions a man takes in from his class and his upbringing, a feel for the game that runs beneath thought and reproduces the conditions that formed it. Taste is cultural capital, the schooled competence that works like money, confers advantage, and converts into prestige, while appearing to be a gift. And taste is a weapon. In Distinction he shows that the educated hold a “pure” aesthetic that prizes form over function, manner over matter, distance over engagement, and refuses the facile and the immediately pleasing, while the popular aesthetic wants involvement, content, recognition, and the work that connects to life. The pure gaze knows itself by what it spurns. Distinction is negative at the root. Tastes are first of all distastes, and disgust at the common is the engine that drives the whole thing. Around this he sets the field of cultural production, a structured space where agents fight over the power to consecrate, to say what counts as real art and who is a true writer, and where, at the autonomous pole, success is won by refusing commercial success, the economic world turned upside down, so that disinterest becomes the supreme value and the surest path to symbolic capital. Holding it together is misrecognition, the trick by which inherited advantage appears as natural gift and the social arbitrary passes for objective worth.
Set Emre inside this and she stops being a singular sensibility and becomes a clean instance of the type.
Her aesthetic is the pure gaze drawn to the letter. Form over what the essay is about. Distance over identification. The bracketing of easy pleasure, the refusal of the warm reward, the demand that one not read for self-recognition or consolation. She did not discover this stance. It is the disposition of the educated bourgeoisie that Bourdieu anatomized, the class habitus of people raised and schooled to prize the difficult and recoil from the facile, and she presents it as the mature and correct way to read. Her serious reading is the pure gaze. The unserious reading she condemns is the popular aesthetic, engagement and content and feeling, the taste of the many.
And her criticism runs on disgust, which is no accident but the working core of distinction. Her strongest moves are her refusals. The confessional is messy, twee, peacocking, narcissistic. The recoil from the popular is the act by which she constitutes herself as serious, because the pure gaze has no content of its own apart from what it spurns. Her position is parasitic on the warm essayist she despises. Take away the vulgar and the refined has nothing left to be refined against.
What looks like her superior eye is, in this account, accumulated cultural capital misrecognized as gift. The trained discrimination, the feel for good prose, is the habitus of Harvard and Yale and a lifetime of the right reading, class made flesh, and when she names a reading serious she is reading her own class-marked dispositions as objective quality. The misrecognition is the heart of it. The social, inherited advantage, appears as the aesthetic, talent and sensibility, and then she universalizes the disposition of her class as the standard all reading must meet, the bourgeois gaze offered as the gaze as such.
In the field she is a consecrating agent. Her verdicts confer or withhold legitimacy, Gaitskill anointed and Chew-Bose denied, and the stake of the game is the symbolic power to say what is real writing. Her authority is a position backed by the institutions that hold consecrating power, the New Yorker, the endowed chair, the prizes. And the prizes are the field certifying her as a certifier, consecrating the consecrator.
Emre valorizes the difficult and the unsentimental against the popular and the marketable, which places her at the autonomous pole of the field, the pole where consecration is won by refusing commercial reward. Part of the confessional essay’s sin, in her telling, is that it sells, that it is monetizable and popular, and at the restricted pole popularity is the mark of the unconsecrated. So her cold creed, art served cold, the disinterested gaze, is the badge of that pole, the loser-wins logic in which spurning the market’s rewards is the road to symbolic capital. And symbolic capital converts. The prestige of the cold critic becomes the magazine contract, the professorship, the brand. She refuses the market in the name of art and is paid by the field’s own market in prestige. The disinterest is interested all the way down, interested in the one currency the autonomous pole mints, and it pays.
Her campaign to professionalize criticism reads, in these terms, as the defense of the field’s autonomy and the guild’s monopoly on legitimate consecration. To credential the power to judge is to raise the barriers, reproduce the habitus, and protect the worth of the cultural capital the credentialed already hold. Homo Academicus is the study of a field reproducing itself, and her profession of criticism is that reproduction proposed out loud. The popular essay threatens it because it democratizes consecration. When anyone can write and publish and be read with no gatekeeper, the rare competence loses its scarcity, and the cultural capital deflates. Her hostility to the confessional is, at bottom, the field guarding the value of its capital against the inflation the masses bring.
Emre is half a Bourdieusian herself. She unmasks the personality test and the literary brand as instruments that sort and value, amateur sociology of legibility. Bourdieu turns the move back. She is a position in a field, her taste is her class habitus, her authority is cultural capital misrecognized as gift, and her disinterest is a strategy for symbolic capital. The analyst of how value gets manufactured is a product of the manufacture, and the one interest she cannot see is the interest carried in her own pure gaze.
Two limits. The frame reduces all taste to class strategy and leaves no room for the chance that a judgment tracks a real feature of the work. That over-reach is the frame’s own blind spot. Showing that Emre’s taste is class-marked does not show it is wrong, because a class-formed disposition can still pick out true qualities, and Bourdieu has no way to tell a sound judgment from a positional one, since his apparatus denies the distinction has any content. And it catches everyone, the warm essayist and the cold critic and Bourdieu alike, since on this account all taste is positional. The specific bite on Emre is not that she has a class taste. Everyone does. It is that she presents the disposition of her class as the universal measure and her disinterest as purity, which is the exact misrecognition Bourdieu says the dominant always perform.
Love as Naivety: Merve Emre and Rita Felski’s Postcritique
Felski’s move is to stop doing critique long enough to describe it. Ricoeur named the hermeneutics of suspicion, the style of Marx and Nietzsche and Freud, reading beneath the surface to expose what the text hides, and Felski in The Limits of Critique (2015) treats that suspicion not as a method but as a mood, a recognizable sensibility with its own affect and its own rhetoric. The mood has a shape. It digs down toward a hidden truth and it stands back at a cool distance, the two spatial habits of depth and detachment. It is vigilant, on guard against being duped, because its deepest fear is looking naive. It flatters the one who holds it, since the critic who sees through is by definition more awake than the text and than the ordinary reader. And it has hardened into ritual, the critic as detective and prosecutor, arriving at a verdict known before the reading began, the text always turning out to be complicit with power. Above all it forecloses. Enchantment, recognition, absorption, consolation, the sense of being moved or finding a book useful, all of these the suspicious mood codes as embarrassing, the responses of the credulous. Latour said critique had run out of steam, generating only more distance and never any care. Sedgwick (1950-2009) called the mood paranoid and asked for a reparative reading beside it, one open to nourishment and surprise. Felski’s program, postcritique, is to relativize suspicion, to make room again for what texts do to us and what we do with them.
Drop Emre into this and she is the case the book was written against.
Her love and mastery split is Felski’s binary stated outright. Amateur readers read for love, attachment, identification, pleasure. Academic readers read for mastery, critique, suspicion, control. Emre offers a synthesis, but the rank is plain. Mastery is the adult competence and love is the raw material to be disciplined. Felski’s whole argument is that this ordering is the founding self-flattery of critique, the unearned coding of attachment as childish and suspicion as grown-up. She wants to recover love as a real and even primary relation to a text, not the stage you outgrow. So Emre stands on the exact ground Felski set out to clear, and she stands there proudly.
Run the features of the mood through her and they all light up. Depth and distance, the cold critic holding the text at arm’s length as an object of scrutiny, reading beneath the surface for the hidden device, the gimmick, the legibility-tool. The fear of being duped, her sharpest contempt reserved for the reader who lets herself be moved, who is seduced, and she knows the word, she used it of her own helpless pleasure in the personality quiz and then ironized the pleasure at once. Self-flattery, the cold critic positioned as more awake than the warm essayist and the common reader, demystification handing her the distinction. And the rote verdict, the one solvent that turns the personality test and the celebrated novel into the same thing, instruments that flatten complexity for capital. Felski’s charge that the suspicious reading knows its conclusion in advance is your one-solvent point in her vocabulary.
The foreclosure is the heart of the indictment. Felski says the suspicious mood amputates most of what literature is for, and Emre’s prosecution of the personal essay performs the amputation in public. The confessional reader reads for recognition, for consolation, for attachment, for the sense of not being alone, and Emre codes all of it as narcissism and naivety. Felski answers that these are not errors a mature reader has left behind. They are central modes of engagement, and a criticism that can only see through and never be moved has cut away the larger part of reading. Her serious reading, in this light, is an impoverished reading that has mistaken its own narrowness for rigor.
By Sedgwick’s distinction her reading is paranoid through and through. It anticipates the text’s guilt and forecloses any good surprise, reading to avoid being fooled. The reparative reading Felski wants, open to being nourished and sustained and caught off guard, is closed to Emre by her own creed, because to be nourished or consoled is, in her grammar, to be naive. She is barred from the relation to texts Felski argues is no less adult than the suspicious one. The bar is self-imposed and she calls it maturity.
Emre’s loudest complaint about other critics is that they only project their feelings and never engage the text. Felski flips the accusation clean over. The suspicious critic who claims rigorous engagement is in truth the least engaged with the text as a thing that acts on a reader, the most defended against it, holding it far enough away that it cannot reach her. The warm reader she dismisses for projecting feelings is often the one more open to what the work does, since the work has moved her and met her. So her charge against the affective critic, that they fail to engage the text, is the charge that comes back on her hardest. The stance she calls engagement is the one that keeps the text at the greatest distance.
Felski is a literary scholar in Emre’s own field, and postcritique has been the central methodological quarrel in literary study for a decade. Emre’s defense of suspicious, form-first, mastery reading is a position in that quarrel, on the side Felski has already written the case against. Latour stands behind with the complaint that the suspicious reflex debunks everything and builds nothing. This is the in-house argument, and Emre is a combatant in it who has not answered the strongest brief against her.
The Robe of Austerity: Merve Emre and Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Nietzsche’s method in On the Genealogy of Morals is to refuse a value its face. Where others see nobility, he asks whom the nobility empowers and where it was bred. Two of his findings bear on Emre. The first is ressentiment, the engine of what he calls slave morality. The man who cannot win, who cannot discharge his will in action, takes his revenge in valuation. He begins with a No to what is outside him, to the strong, and only afterward calls himself good. He recodes his own incapacity as virtue. The lamb cannot seize, so it calls the bird of prey evil and its own meekness goodness. The second finding is the ascetic ideal, the crowning of renunciation, self-denial, the turning against pleasure and the body, as the highest values, and behind it the ascetic priest, who is weak in the world yet rules it by interpreting the suffering of the herd, directing their resentment, and giving their pain a meaning. The priest’s power comes from denial. Nietzsche’s hardest line is that man would rather will nothingness than not will, that even the renunciation of life is the will to power finding the only outlet a certain weakness allows.
Set Emre against this and her austerity stops looking like nobility and starts looking like a lineage.
Her creed is the ascetic ideal moved from the monastery to the seminar. Renounce warmth. Renounce consolation. Renounce identification, pleasure, the easy, the seductive. Prize the cold, the difficult, the disinterested. Where the priest renounces the flesh, she renounces feeling, and like the priest she crowns the renunciation as the highest thing, the mark of the serious and the adult. Nietzsche’s question lands at once. What does it mean that renunciation is valued so highly here? His answer is that the denial is the distinction. She claims a higher rank by abstaining from the comforts other readers take, and the abstention itself is the power. She rules by going without.
She is the ascetic priest in the literary order, not merely a renouncer but the one who organizes renunciation. She does not write the popular books. She judges them. She tells readers what their pleasures are worth, which is nothing, naive, a seduction, and she gives their condition an interpretation, that they are duped by capitalist devices and soothed by lies, and she offers the path out, the cold gaze, serious reading, the renunciation of consolation as the road to seriousness. Hers is a pastoral power, the dominion of the interpreter over the doer. She makes nothing the market rewards. She consecrates and condemns what others make, and her authority is the priest’s authority, the power of the one who assigns guilt to the deed he did not dare.
Serious reading is defined by what it refuses, the warm essay, the popular novel, the easy pleasure, and it has almost no positive content apart from the negation. Slave morality creates by saying no to an outside and only then yes to a self built from the refusal. Take away the warm writer she recoils from and the cold critic has nothing left to be.
Now the ressentiment. In the literary world the figure who wins the worldly contest is the writer the public devours, whose confession sells, who is read by the many. The critic of the cold and difficult pole loses that contest. Her work is read by few and moves no crowd. Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment predicts what comes next. The one who cannot win recodes the losing as height. The popular becomes the base, the marketable becomes the compromised, the loved becomes the duped, and her own small unread austerity becomes the true good, the few refined against the many seduced. The valuation inverts as he describes. What the market calls good she calls corrupt, and what the market ignores she crowns. The lamb that cannot be a bird of prey calls the bird of prey evil and names its own inability to be devoured a virtue.
This is where the frame turns her death-facing valor inside out. That reading found terror under the courage, the dread of death hidden in the unflinching pose. Nietzsche finds something else under it, will to power and ressentiment. Her praise of facing the worst without comfort, the loser who dies, the feeling drained before the camps, looks like nerve. Trace its lineage and it is the ascetic ideal, rank claimed through the refusal of consolation, and it is the dignifying of a deprivation. She has little warmth and few readers, and she crowns the lack as the higher state. I face the worst and take no comfort is the literary form of blessed are the meek, the powerless recoding their want as the summit of the spirit. And her refusal of every comfort, her unmasking of the self as fiction and consolation as lie, is the will that would rather will nothingness than not will, the negation that gives her the meaning warmth would have given another reader. She is never without a verdict, never without something to strip bare, and the activity of stripping is her bread.
Emre traces the personality test to capital and the essay to bourgeois ideology, never taking a cultural form at its word. Nietzsche turns the same blade on her highest value. Do not take seriousness and the cold gaze as nobility. Trace them. The line runs back to the priest and to ressentiment, to the power of renunciation and the recoding of exclusion as merit. She unmasks everyone’s values as interested, and the Genealogy unmasks hers, the austerity as a will to power and the courage as the proud name for what she was denied.
Two limits. The ressentiment charge is a suspicion, not a proof. Pressed hard it explains too much, since any virtue can be called a disguised weakness and the accusation becomes impossible to falsify, no better at telling a true austerity from a hidden resentment than the other grand frames are at their own borders. It does not show a single one of her readings wrong, because genealogy attacks the pedigree of a value, not the truth of a verdict, and a cold reading can be a true reading even if coldness is, in its lineage, the recoding of a lack. And Nietzsche himself did not simply despise the ascetic. He saw the discipline it took and the strength it preserved, so the honest reading is both at once.
Matter Out of Place: Merve Emre and Mary Douglas
Douglas begins Purity and Danger with a line that undoes the idea of dirt. There is no absolute dirt. Dirt is matter out of place, the by-product of a system of classification, the element rejected because it will not fit. Shoes are not unclean, but shoes on the dining table are. Food is not unclean, but food smeared on a coat is. So dirt implies two things at once, an order of categories and a violation of that order. From this she builds an account of pollution. Where a cherished classification is threatened by something anomalous, something that falls between the categories or belongs to two at once, the group feels danger, and the danger is felt as disgust, and the disgust drives the impulse to expel or to purify. Pollution rules are the defense of a system’s lines. She gives the body a central place, because the body’s margins, its orifices and leakages, the spittle and blood and seeping, stand for the margins of the social order, and matter issuing from a bodily boundary is the paradigm of the unclean. And she adds a warning that turns the whole thing reflexive. Purity is the enemy of ambiguity and change. The perfectly pure is barren. The drive to keep the categories clean, pushed far enough, ends in sterility, because lived experience is mixed and a system that expels all anomaly expels much of life.
Set Emre’s revulsion against this and it stops being temperament and becomes a pollution reaction, textbook and complete.
First, name her order, because dirt is relative to a system and you cannot see the dirt until you see the system. Her classification keeps literature apart from therapy, the made object apart from the leaking self, criticism as form and judgment apart from criticism as feeling, the serious apart from the merely personal. The confessional essay is dirt in this order because it is matter out of place. It carries the wound, the appetite, the private interior, the therapeutic, into the room reserved for the made literary thing and the disinterested gaze. It mixes the categories she keeps separate, art with confession, judgment with feeling, the public object with the private seepage. Her disgust is the order rejecting the element that will not fit.
The heat is the proof. The dirty shards, the contamination, the recoil from the messy and the breathless, this is not a personal tic but the predictable affect Douglas describes. Disgust is the emotion that guards a classification. You feel disagreement toward a bad argument and disgust toward a thing that violates your categories, and Emre feels disgust, which tells you the personal essay is not merely a weak genre to her but a polluting one. The intensity is diagnostic. It measures how much of her order the thing puts at risk.
The sharpest fit is the body, because her revulsions are bodily-margin revulsions to the letter. Douglas says matter issuing from the boundary of the body, the leak, the seep, is the chief pollution, since the body’s edge stands for the social edge where the system is weakest. And Emre’s scorn aims with precision at the leaking essay, the one with no firm border, the breathless self that spills, the hygiene gaffe, the exposed wound, the interior shown at the margin. The confessional essay pollutes because it is the social body’s margin made visible, the unbounded self seeping past its edge. Her clean object, by contrast, is the bounded, sealed, formal thing whose boundaries hold. Her whole aesthetic is a purity aesthetic, the clean set against the leaking, the sealed against the seeping, and the disgust is the body of serious literature recoiling from its own exposed margin.
The personal essay is anomalous. It is neither literature nor therapy and both at once, neither public nor private and both at once, made and leaked together. It refuses to settle into a category, and the unsettled thing is the dangerous thing. Douglas lists how cultures handle the anomaly. They label it dangerous, they expel it, or they force it back into a category. Emre runs the whole list. She labels it dirty and naive, she casts it out of the republic of serious letters, and she shoves it down into its proper bin, memoir, therapy, the low, not literature. The death of the personal essay that she half-welcomes is a purification, the literary order cleansed by the expulsion of the hybrid that fouled it.
The lines she guards are the lines of the social body she belongs to, serious criticism and its guild. Pollution rules defend a system’s categories, and the categories are the group’s identity, so her purity reaction is the immune response of the field to the democratizing flood of confessional and internet writing that crosses its boundaries and threatens its order.
Here Douglas turns the blade. Her deepest point is that the pursuit of purity is itself a danger, that purity is the enemy of ambiguity and compromise and that the wholly pure is barren. Emre’s purity aesthetic is the sterile kind. The messiness she handles as filth is, in Douglas’s frame, the productive ambiguity, the matter that does not fit, which a living system metabolizes rather than only casts out, and which is a source of power and renewal as much as of danger. Emre can only expel. She has no ritual for incorporating the anomaly, only the taboo that quarantines it. And the irony is heavy. The sophisticated critic, the demystifier of others’ primitive sortings, is performing the oldest cultural operation Douglas describes, the pollution taboo, the disgust-driven removal of the unclean, and she is dressing the taboo as aesthetic judgment. The recoil from filth is older than criticism, and she is running it in a seminar.
Class explains the taste, the suspicious mood explains the method, the fear of death and the resentment explain the posture, but none of them names the disgust, the particular recoil that is not contempt and not disagreement but the horror of the unclean. Douglas names it. The disgust is boundary-work, and its object is always matter out of place, the crosser of lines, the leaking margin. Which means her revulsion tells us little about the books and much about the system she defends. The heat is the size of the threat to her order, not the size of the fault in the prose.
Two limits. Every group classifies and so every group makes dirt and keeps pollution rules, so finding a purity reaction in Emre does not mark her as uniquely irrational, only as human. It shows nothing about whether her verdicts are right, because a pollution reaction can sit beside a true judgment, and the essay she recoils from may also be bad prose, which is a separate question from why she recoils. And classification is not a vice. Categories do real work, a culture with none is no culture, and the line between made art and raw confession may track something that holds. The cut Douglas makes is not at the line but at the way Emre defends it, the visceral purity reaction, the expulsion that is her only move, and her blindness to what is lost when the anomaly is thrown out rather than taken in.
What coalition does she depend on for status and income.
The credentialed guild of literary consecration and the institutions that house it. Her income and standing come from the university, the endowed chair and the directorship at Wesleyan, Oxford and Yale and Harvard behind them, from the prestige press, the New Yorker masthead, the NYRB, the LRB, from the prize committees that crowned her, Leverhulme and Silvers and the National Book Critics Circle, from the academic publishers, and from the podcast tied to the NYRB and Lit Hub. Every one of these is a body whose work is to draw the line between high and low, serious and unserious, and to award the standing that follows. Her position depends on the continued authority and the continued scarcity of that class. She is paid and certified by the apparatus of consecration, and she sits near its center.
Who does she risk angering if she speaks plainly.
Her own coalition, which is why the things she leaves alone are the things that would offend it. She can flay the confessional writer, the personality test, corporate culture, and capitalism at no cost, because those targets sit outside the guild and beating them flatters it. What she cannot do is say plainly that academic criticism is a guild protecting a monopoly, that the prestige economy rewards the password over the argument, that her own milieu’s politics shape what gets praised. She also navigates the progressive consensus inside the academy with care. When “Two Paths” was read as a dismissal of essayists of color, the guild’s own left turned on her, and she has trimmed since. So she may prosecute the warm essay as an aesthetic category, but she must not be seen attacking the marginalized writer, because her coalition includes the people who would punish that. The plain speech she avoids is the plain speech that would anger the room that pays her.
Who benefits if her framing wins.
The guild, the institutions, and herself at their center. If serious reading is form and judgment, if criticism becomes a profession, if the confessional and identifying and affective modes are naive, if demystification is the only adult posture and real judgment needs credentialed training, then the credentialed critic’s cultural capital appreciates, the monopoly on legitimate consecration holds, and the scarcity that gives the capital its worth is defended against the democratizing flood of internet and confessional writing. The universities and the magazines keep their place as the gatekeepers of the serious. And Emre, sitting at the hub of that apparatus, keeps her verdicts in the grammar of findings rather than opinions. Who loses is the amateur, the confessional writer, the uncredentialed essayist, the reader who reads for love and recognition. Her framing recodes their work as naive and restores the gatekeepers’ power over them.
What truths would cost her her position.
The ones she never examines, and the overlap is not chance. That unsentimental clarity is one partisan tradition and not neutral ground, since admitting it drops her verdicts to opinions. That her trained eye is inherited cultural capital misrecognized as gift. That the profession she campaigns for is a guild guarding the value of its own capital, not the keeper of a transmissible expertise. That her demystification and her cold persona are themselves bids for distinction, no purer than the confessor’s bid to be seen. That the hunger for the easy and the warm is human and old, not a thing capitalism installed, which would shrink her politics to snobbery. That her sympathy is rationed, given to the private test-taker and withheld from the rival essayist, which would expose the contempt as turf defense. And the most dangerous one, that the personal essay’s “I” tracks a real self, so that her demolition of the genre is one critic disliking a kind of book rather than the exposure of a lie. Let any of these be true and said aloud, and the high ground goes.
Put the four answers side by side and they point one way. The coalition that funds her, the people she dares not anger, the beneficiaries of her framing, and the truths she cannot afford are the same set, drawn from one circle. Her positions sit where her interests sit.
David Pinsof’s claim in “Status Is Weird” is that we all want status, none of us can admit it, and so we chase it in the dark. A status game works only while the players cannot see it as a status game. Hang a neon sign on it reading STATUS GAME and it dies in the light like a vampire, because the second you are caught wanting status you look selfish and insecure and lose the very thing you wanted. So we pretend not to care, which is how we care. When a game gets exposed, players flee into an anti-status game that signals they are above status, and the anti-status game is only another status game in a new costume. We attack the games we are losing, calling them toxic and hypocritical, and we shield the games we are winning, calling them noble and dressing them in sacred values, integrity, beauty, knowledge, rigor, that we swear are loved for their own sake. Culture wars are not clashes of values. They are power struggles between rival subcultures over whose rules will set the price of status, fought with the universal move of accusing your rival of status-seeking while you pretend to want only the higher things. And the sharpest turn, Pinsof says his own see-through-the-bullshit project is a status game too, played because he thinks he can win it.
Set Emre inside this and almost every part of her snaps into place.
She is a player in the educated-class anti-status game Pinsof describes, the one the counter-elite built to spite the WASPs and shills of the money era. She left Bain, and tells the story as a defection, the terrible consultant studying for the literature exam under her desk. She crossed from the douchey game of wealth into the cool game of wit and seriousness, the game played in academia and the prestige press, where pecuniary reward is thin but the flaunting of mind is rich. Her valorization of the difficult over the marketable, the disinterested over the commercial, the cold over the warm, is the literary form of Pinsof’s reversal. Where his counter-elite made the expensive gauche and the rustic chic, Emre makes the popular naive and the unread serious. Her aesthetic is the anti-status status game of her subculture, worn as if it were truth.
And she plays it in the dark, which is the requirement. Her self-understanding is that she wants no status, only form and rigor, that she serves an impartial love of the made object. Pinsof predicts her central move precisely. People accuse their rivals of being uncool status-seekers while pretending they themselves are above it. Emre’s charge against the confessional writer, peacocking, self-fetishization, narcissism, the bid to be seen, is that accusation. She names the rival’s status hunger to win status, and she cannot see that her own cold seriousness is the same hunger in a colder coat, because to see it would turn on the light and end the game.
Her whole critical method is Pinsof’s recipe for attacking a game you are losing. If you dislike a game, expose it. Satirize its players, translate its covert signals into plain speech, reveal its hypocrisy, and it collapses. That is demystification, and it is what she does to the personal essay. She exposes its covert operation, the salable performance of personhood angling for the freelance contract, she cites the parody that satirizes its players, she translates the complex-selfhood signal into a sales pitch. Why this target? Because in market terms it is the game she is losing. The confessional writers get the audience, the virality, the mass love. So she lights them up.
And she shields the game she is winning, which is the other half of the recipe. She never exposes serious reading as a status game, never translates the critic’s signals into the plain currency of distinction, never admits the cold persona is a play for rank. She treats seriousness and form and rigor as sacred values, important in themselves, owed nothing to the status they pay out. Pinsof says we must pretend the sacred values are loved for their own sake, and that questioning them is taboo, and that we defend them with anger, how dare you mock dueling. Her hot contempt for the writers who profane the serious is that angry defense, the immune response of a fragile game to the threat of exposure.
The bias shows in where she aims. She attacks outward and downward, at the popular and the confessional and the corporate, the games she does not rule, and never inward, at the prestige-criticism apparatus that pays her. Her one solvent, the reading that turns every cultural object into a device for flattening complexity under capital, gets poured on the personality test and the bestseller and never once on the endowed chair, the masthead, the prize. That asymmetry is not an oversight. It is Pinsof’s bias made visible, attack the game you lose, spare the game you win.
The fight she frames as values, form against feeling, rigor against naivety, is in these terms a power struggle between literary subcultures over whose rules set the worth of literary capital. The cold formalists and the warm confessionalists are not disagreeing about truth. They are contesting which game’s rules will reign, and Emre dresses her side’s bid as the love of seriousness.
Now the turn the frame demands, and it eats the hand that holds it. By Pinsof’s own logic, exposing Emre’s status game is itself a status game, the anti-anti-status move, the connoisseur who gains rank by seeing through the connoisseur. The whole project of these essays, the cool diagnosis of her hidden status hunger, is a bid for the status that goes to the one who sees through the seer.
Emre’s Set: A Portrait
Picture the class first, because the woman is a clean specimen of it. These are the credentialed people of letters. The tenured and the prestige-press critics, the English and comparative-literature departments, the orbit of the New Yorker and the New York Review and the London Review and the smaller serious magazines, the criticism and writing programs, the prize juries, the editors, the festival and podcast circuit. Most have crossed out of the money world or never entered it, and they wear the crossing as a virtue. They are educated past the point of common reference, secular, left of center in a knowing rather than an earnest way, cosmopolitan, fluent in the right names and the right dislikes. Emre is their representative, and to paint her set is to paint the room she rose through.
What they value is mind over feeling, the made thing over the confession, the cool over the warm, the difficult over the easy, and the unbought over the sold. Seriousness is their highest word and rigor its instrument. They prize form, style, irony, detachment, the suspicious intelligence that sees through. They prize the international and the translated, the canon and the correct contemporaries. They prize anti-commercialism as such, so that the unread difficult book outranks the loved popular one, and the marketable carries a faint smell of shame. And they tell themselves, as Pinsof says all such people must, that they are moved by an impartial love of truth and beauty and seriousness, not by anything so low as rank.
Their hero system is built on the mind that lasts. Immortality, for them, is the durable judgment, the essay anthologized, the name fixed in the canon, the students who carry the master forward. The hero is the one who sees clearly and does not flinch, who faces meaninglessness and takes no comfort, who is tough enough to refuse the warm lie. He earns his significance by standing apart from the creaturely herd, the mass that soothes itself with bestsellers and horoscopes and self-help and confession. The university and the magazine are the institutions that promise the transcendence, the place where a man’s name might outlive his body. And like every hero system it needs a scapegoat to carry what the set must expel. The middlebrow, the confessional, the popular, the credulous reader carry the mortality and the neediness the serious must purge to feel themselves above the dying. The set prides itself on confronting the void, and the confrontation is the hero system, the way they feel like the only adults in the nursery of the doomed.
Their status games run by Pinsof’s rules, played in the dark. The game is the anti-status game of the educated, the refusal of vulgar wealth-signaling in favor of wit and taste and the right opinions, conspicuous cultivation in place of conspicuous consumption. The signals are the citations, the difficult prose, the knowing irony, the correct embarrassments, earnestness and sentiment and popularity, and the memberships, the masthead and the festival and the chair. They cannot admit any of it is status, because admitting it would collapse the game, so they call it integrity and seriousness and hold those as sacred values whose questioning is taboo. They attack the games they are losing, the commercial and the popular and the influencer and the finance man, as toxic and naive, and they defend the game they are winning, elite criticism and the canon and the credential, as noble. They accuse their rivals of status-seeking, middlebrow, performative, pandering, while denying their own. And they sense the game wobbling, which is the true content of their endless lament about the crisis of the humanities, the credential losing value and the internet handing consecration to anyone, the lights coming up at the edges of the room.
Their normative claims are tastes promoted to duties. One ought to read for form and not for feeling. One ought to be unsentimental and ironic and suspicious. One ought to find the popular embarrassing and the difficult admirable. One ought to hold the right knowing politics. These are stated not as the conventions of a class but as the standards binding on any competent, mature, serious person, so that a reader who reads otherwise has not merely chosen differently but failed. Turner’s point is the one to keep. The authority of these oughts is only the agreement of the community that holds them, dressed as an objective requirement that the rest of the world is flunking. The serious reader ought to is a convenient normativity, the set’s preferences worn as the moral law others break.
Their essentialist claims are the sharpest tell, because the set runs essentialism in one direction only. They are fierce anti-essentialists about everyone else’s categories. Gender is constructed, the self is constructed, personality is a capitalist fiction, identity is performance, the individual is an idea the bourgeoisie invented. Emre’s own demolition of the personal essay’s I is this move at full strength. Yet about their own categories they go quietly essentialist. There is such a thing as serious literature with a real nature, distinct from mere confession. There is the critic, a kind with an essential competence. There is rigor, a true thing the trained can feel and the untrained cannot. Some writing is art in its essence and some is therapy in its essence, and taste tracks a real quality out there in the work. Turner would say all of these are practices and conventions of a community mistaken for essences, and that the giveaway is the selectivity. Deconstruct theirs, naturalize ours. The self is a fiction, but serious reading is not. Personality is a construct, but critical judgment touches the real. The hand that dissolves every other essence holds its own essences tight.
For all the rank-seeking, they do the curatorial work the market will not. They keep hard books alive, defend craft against the feed, carry a canon forward, and sustain difficult writing that no audience would pay for.
David Pinsof argues that intellectuals blame humanity’s problems on misunderstanding because the story makes intellectuals the heroes. Pinsof says people understand what they have an incentive to understand. The driver of human behavior is status competition, coalition maintenance, and the derogation of rivals under moralistic cover. Stated motives diverge from actual motives. The intellectual who promises to fix misunderstanding offers a flattering self-portrait first and a theory of the world second.
Apply this to Emre.
Her stated mission is illumination. She reads carefully. She rescues neglected women modernists. She exposes the pseudoscience behind the Myers-Briggs. She teaches the next generation of critics to read with rigor. She runs a center that fosters criticism as a public art.
Her actual mission, on Pinsof’s reading, is something else.
Take The Personality Brokers. Emre presents the book as a corrective. Millions of Americans take the Myers-Briggs. The test rests on shaky empirical ground. Emre’s history shows how Katharine Briggs (1875-1968) and Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980), two women without psychological training, built an industry on weak Jungian foundations. The stated payoff is enlightenment. Readers see through the racket.
Pinsof’s frame produces a different reading. The people who take the Myers-Briggs are not victims of misunderstanding. They use the test for social purposes that work for them. The test gives them vocabulary for talking about themselves at work, a way to bond with colleagues, an idiom for romantic compatibility. They get what they pay for. Emre’s exposé does not free them from confusion. It asserts elite epistemic authority over middlebrow self-knowledge. The book’s actual function is to mark Emre as a member of the educated class that sees through what the masses fall for. Her readers buy the book to mark themselves the same way. The transaction is status, not insight.
Take her The New Yorker criticism. Emre reviews novels and writes profiles of figures like Sally Rooney (b. 1991), Helen Garner (b. 1942), Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), Rachel Cusk (b. 1967), and others. The stated mission is to bring careful attention to literary art. The Pinsof reading: her reviews allocate prestige. They tell readers which writers belong in the conversation and which do not. They mark Emre as one of the people who decides. A favorable Emre review confers status on the author. A skeptical one withholds it. The criticism does work in the literary status hierarchy that has nothing to do with illumination.
Take her recovery work on midcentury women writers. The stated mission is justice. These writers were overlooked. Emre brings them back. Pinsof’s reading: literary recovery is a form of status entrepreneurship. The recoverer claims credit for restoring a reputation, which converts into reputation for the recoverer. The recovered writer becomes a token in elite literary commerce. The transaction looks like generosity. It functions like investment.
Take the Shapiro Center. Emre teaches workshops on criticism. She trains young critics. The stated mission is to keep the practice of criticism alive at a moment when book pages are dying. Pinsof’s reading: the center is a status allocation engine. Emre selects the participants. She decides who counts as a serious critic in formation. The graduates go on to publish in the venues Emre helps gatekeep. The circuit produces a coalition of critics aligned with Emre’s tastes and her politics. The stated function is pedagogical. The actual function is dynastic.
Take her treatment of rival critics. Emre has written about Christian Lorentzen (b. 1977), James Wood (b. 1965), and others, sometimes warmly and sometimes not. The criticism looks like disagreement about literary value. On Pinsof’s reading, it looks like positioning. Each critic competes for the same finite supply of New Yorker space, NYRB space, Harper’s space, prize committees, endowed chairs. The disagreements track the competition.
Pinsof’s frame predicts a pattern in Emre’s writing. She tends to be hardest on those closest to her in the hierarchy. The literary critics one rung down or one rung over get the sharpest treatment. The figures at her own level get respectful disagreement. The figures far above her, the canonical dead, get reverence. The figures far below her, the popular mass-market writers and the personality industry charlatans, get the loftiest contempt. This is what the writing shows. Most working critics show the same pattern because critics live in a finite-supply prestige economy and behave accordingly.
None of this is a misunderstanding. Emre understands her position. Her readers understand theirs. The personality testing industry understands what it sells. The recovered women modernists were not recovered through pure justice or pure status entrepreneurship but through both at once, which is how literary recovery has always worked. The system runs on motives that nobody states because stating them defeats the purpose. The stated mission is illumination. The operating one is hierarchy maintenance under the cover of illumination.
Emre’s defenders say this reading is too cynical. They say her readings are careful, her judgments fair, her recoveries valuable, her teaching generous. Pinsof’s reply: those things can be true and also beside the point. Starbucks does nurture the human spirit in some sense. Starbucks also pursues profit. The mission statement does not contradict the operation. It runs interference for it.
A critic can be right about every book she reviews and still run a status allocation operation, because being right about books is one of the things that earns you the right to allocate status.
The frame closes on a hard point. If criticism is mostly hierarchy work under the cover of illumination, then the proper response is not to fix the misunderstanding by writing better criticism. There is no misunderstanding to fix. The hierarchy work is what criticism does. Everyone who plays the game plays the game. The honest move is to admit it. The frame predicts that no major critic, including Emre, will admit it, because admission cancels the social function of the role.
The cynic and the careerist arrive at the same office through different doors. The cynic just tells you which door he used.
Merve Emre occupies a position that forces her output through a tight signaling filter. She writes for The New Yorker, holds an endowed chair at Wesleyan, contributes to the London Review of Books, and rose from Oxford associate professor to celebrity critic in a handful of years. Her audiences want incompatible things from her. The magazine readership rewards accessible prose, sharp judgments, the writerly turn. The academy rewards theoretical depth, footnotes, distance from middlebrow celebrity. Each audience punishes her for the signals she sends to the other.
Pinsof says most signaling is defensive. Emre’s output supports the claim. She holds that contemporary critics fail at the basics of form and style. The line reads as an offensive signal, an attack on rivals. Look closer. The line defends. She heads off the charge that magazine criticism runs shallow by displacing the shallowness onto unnamed others. The accusation that might land on her lands on a different critic, the one who hand-waves at plot and theme.
The Bain consulting stint reads as the clearest case in her self-presentation. Most former consultants who enter literary criticism erase the line from public bios. Emre brings it up in profiles, framed as an unhappy detour. The detour frame does defensive work. Without the frame, Bain on the résumé signals corporate striver, the sort whose interest in literature might count as performance rather than calling. With the frame, Bain becomes a stop on the way to true vocation, the corporate cage she escaped. Self-framed exposure beats unframed exposure. She tells the story so others cannot tell it on her.
The Turkish immigrant background functions the same way. She does not hide it. She deploys it at moments when the rest of the résumé risks reading as untouched privilege. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Wesleyan, Worcester College fellowship, Philip Leverhulme Prize. Adana, Turkey reframes the line. The immigrant striver story inoculates against the charge of being another Ivy heir to literary capital.
The Personality Brokers performs a similar maneuver in book form. Myers-Briggs as a topic risks dragging her into middlebrow territory. The cure: archival apparatus, the dig into Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, the cultural history register. Treat a pop topic with scholarly gravity and the book reads as a serious study of a popular subject rather than a popular book. The defense holds. Reviewers called it cultural history, not a personality book.
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway sits at the offensive end. Annotation flexes. It says: I have read everything, I know the periodicals Woolf read, I track the references. It says: I belong in the line of Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) and Helen Vendler (1933-2024). It stakes a claim that magazine critics cannot make through magazine criticism alone. The annotated edition is the offensive signal. The labor underneath does defensive work, because every footnote answers in advance the charge that she falls short as a scholar.
Most of her offensive signals carry a defensive payload underneath. Profile photographs on Bond Street retracing Clarissa Dalloway’s walk read as glamorous, the celebrity critic at play. The defensive payload: the staging counts as research. She works while photographed working. The image cannot reduce to vanity because the labor sits visible inside the image.
Her argument with Alexander Chee over Ferrante’s anonymity stands as a clean offensive signal in the Pinsof sense. She picked a fight with a progressive consensus that says the author’s identity does not matter. Her position holds that Ferrante’s refusal of biography lodges biography deeper into the work. The argument cuts. She took real risk. Picking that fight could have cost her with The New Yorker audience that hews to author-doesn’t-matter orthodoxy. Everything else she signals insulates the argument. The Turkish background, the immigrant story, the women writers anthology, the Mrs. Dalloway editorial labor. The insulation lets her risk the offensive signal without the cost falling.
The interesting case sits in what she does not do. She does not write the angry essay against the identity-politics turn in literary studies, though her formalist commitments imply the critique. She does not appear in the conservative outlets that might absorb a critic of her gifts. She does not name names when she attacks weak criticism. Each restraint reads as a defensive signal. Such moves carry costs that might land on her career and gains that might not arrive. The “what will people think” filter screens out the verboten options before they reach the page.
The whole package adds up to a critic with strong offensive signals on the surface and a thick defensive substructure underneath. The surface buys her attention. The substructure keeps her safe. Pinsof’s claim that most signaling is defensive holds for Emre. The offensive signals she sends are the ones she can afford, because the defensive signals around them absorb the risk.
Merv Emre writes:
Cathy Curtis’s new biography, A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick, begins with an eyebrow-raising author’s note. “This biography of Elizabeth Hardwick includes only as much information about her famous husband,” Curtis writes, “as is necessary to tell the story of her life.” This is an exhilarating promise, carrying with it a whiff of naughtiness, of feminist insubordination. Perhaps he will be glimpsed aslant, in cutting asides and parentheticals, or better yet, in the footnotes. “The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives,” begins Hardwick’s essay “Wives and Mistresses.” Imagine a biographer wily enough to insist on misreading this statement, treating the famous one as the wife, and her husband as her weighty patriarchal baggage!
Yet Curtis disappoints immediately, with the appearance on the next page of a kind of thesis statement, blunt, earnest, and dutiful:In this first biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, I seek to go beyond the glimpses that a famously private person revealed in her published writing to present a portrait of an exceptional woman who emerged from a long, troubled marriage with the clarity and wisdom that illuminate her brilliant novel Sleepless Nights.
The book that follows arranges the names, dates, and places of Hardwick’s life with a listless and clumsy workmanship; quotes her writing only to measure its likeness to her life; and is overwhelmingly, even slavishly, devoted to the vexatious, humiliating, and pitiable behavior of her famous husband. One wonders why Curtis chose a subject whose favorite topic was the myriad failures of biography. Why show such indifference to an essayist who hands reviewers the most lacerating sentences with which to flog biographers for their sins? For instance: “Biographies inevitably record the demeaning moments of malice and decline and have the effect of imprinting them upon the ninety years.” Or: “There is no doubt that this is ‘the material.’ But it is not an existence.”
Several things bother me.
The opening on Cathy Curtis is unfair. Emre says Curtis’s author’s note carries “a whiff of naughtiness, of feminist insubordination” and “an exhilarating promise.” Then she faults Curtis for not delivering on a promise Curtis never made. Curtis said she would include only as much about Robert Lowell (1917-1977) as needed to tell Hardwick’s story. That is a workmanlike statement of purpose. Emre projects her own wish onto it and then punishes Curtis for not fulfilling the wish. The move is clever as rhetoric and cruel in tone. It also carries the unmistakable confidence of a critic who has solved the husband problem in her own life. That confidence will not last. Emre and Christian Nakarado divorce in August 2025, after eleven years of marriage and two children.
The Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) letter reading is a hedge. Emre calls Hardwick‘s (1916-2007) letter “spiteful, petty, and vain.” Then she builds her portrait of the critic around the claim that the letter’s voice is the critic’s voice. Maybe so. But Emre never asks whether Hardwick saw those wives. Calling the cruelty cruelty before redeeming it as criticism lets her have it both ways. Hardwick was sometimes savage because savagery was warranted.
The fiction gets converted into a parable about the critic’s emergence. Emre reads The Ghostly Lover and The Simple Truth as airless, frozen failures that show a critic straining to escape fiction. Plausible. It is also a way of turning Hardwick’s whole career into the story of how Hardwick became the critic Emre needs her to be. Sleepless Nights earns the generous reading because Sleepless Nights fits the wife/critic/mistress argument. The earlier fiction gets demoted because it does not fit. Selection rather than reading.
The Lowell question gets dodged. Lowell looks bad in the essay because the essay is partisan for Hardwick. Fine as criticism. But Lowell was a serious artist who made art from his wife’s letters, and the Dolphin question is a real artistic and ethical problem. Emre quotes “Man and Wife” when the poem flatters Hardwick. She skips the harder question of what Lowell was making. The dodge tells you something about Emre’s vantage in 2022. The closed case of the Lowell marriage made a safe object of study. Her own marriage was open and out of view.
In an April 16, 2022 NYRB interview, Emre says: “When I was a graduate student at Yale, each year, the professors in the English department would put on a staged reading of one of the plays taught in “English 129: Tragedy.” In 2011 I played Célimène in Molière’s The Misanthrope, and in 2012 I played Hedda in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I believe it was the play’s director, the very passionate, very patient Murray Biggs, who suggested I read Hardwick’s essay on Hedda Gabler to prepare for the role. It is a remarkable piece. And it puts its finger on a type of character to whom I am instinctively and alarmingly attracted—the “creatures of the will,” heroes and heroines straining toward victory and self-destruction at once. They seem to be made of both coarser and finer material than ordinary humans. They are wound tight. They are never boring.”
The passage names her. She tells us what she is.
Creature of the will. Straining toward victory and self-destruction at once. Made of both coarser and finer material than ordinary humans. Wound tight. Never boring.
The roles confirm the type. Hedda Gabler shoots herself rather than accept the wife role on offer. Célimène ends alone, exiled from her court of suitors. Both refuse the available compromises. Both are women whose force has no constructive outlet and so consumes the structures around them. Emre played them at Yale in her late twenties. She tells Lauren Kane in 2022 that she is alarmingly attracted to that type.
The word “alarmingly” carries the weight. She is telling us she knows the attraction is not safe. She has the self-awareness. The self-awareness did not save the marriage.
“Never boring.” The same phrase her husband uses about her in 2022 and again, in different words, in February 2025. The criterion she applies to characters she admires is the criterion he applies to her. The repetition is too tight to be accidental. Either she has organized her artistic preferences around what she is, or she has come to see herself through his categorization, or, most plausibly, they have been co-constructing this story for over a decade. She likes creatures of the will. He says he married one. They build a literary marriage on the claim. The claim is also a description of someone who burns through marriages.
“Wound tight.” Look back at the Argus piece. “I’m responsible and conscientious, and you are self-indulgent and daydreaming.” “I wish I were his boss.” “I think I’m perfect.” “Christian mostly hangs out with zombies.” “Are we the best couple you’ve talked to?” The impatience is sharp. The demand for primacy is sharp. The need to be the best, even at a Valentine’s Day student interview, is sharp. This is what wound tight looks like in print.
“Both coarser and finer material than ordinary humans.” This is the artist’s self-flattery and the warning braided together. She is claiming a place above ordinary humans. The coarser part is the willfulness and the trouble. The finer part is the perception and the writing. She is telling Lauren Kane in 2022 that she belongs in the category that fascinates her in fiction. She is auditioning for the role of literary creature of the will. By February 2025 she is performing the marriage of one. By August 2025 the marriage has done what such marriages tend to do.
Hardwick wrote on Hedda in 1971. Emre played Hedda in 2012. Emre wrote on Hardwick writing on Hedda and the other Ibsen women in 2022. At every link the question is the same. Can a woman whose will exceeds the destiny on offer inhabit a marriage without ruining it or being ruined by it? Hardwick’s answer was negative and her consolation was the essay. Emre quoted that answer in 2022 and called it a pyrrhic victory. The interview now reads, from 2026, as Emre rehearsing the consolation she might one day need.
The most honest sentence in the passage: “They are never boring.” She admires the type because the type makes for narrative. Narrative needs trouble. Marriages need calm. The two requirements pull against each other. Hardwick saw this. Hedda lived it. Emre named her own attraction to it in 2022. She is now living the next part of the story.
‘Office Hours, After Hours: Professors Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado’ (Feb. 14, 2025)
The piece runs Valentine’s Day 2025. They pose for two photos. The framing is “professors in love.” Emre and Nakarado banter about meeting at a Yale med school party in 2010, about a New Haven bar pickup, about her being a backseat driver, about Beyoncé and Lenox Hill, about their kids. Christian closes with the line that Merve is “the most alive person I’ve ever encountered.” Six months later they divorce.
Several things stand out.
The piece is a performance. Posed photographs. Valentine’s Day publication. The student journalists ask soft questions and the couple delivers polished anecdotes. This is the literary-couple genre Hardwick listed in “George Eliot’s Husband”: Eliot and Lewes, the Brownings, the Webbs, the Carlyles, the Woolfs. Emre quoted that list in 2022 with longing. By February 2025 she is claiming her place in it. By August the marriage is over.
The lines repeat. In 2022 Emre tells Lauren Kane that her husband married her so life would never be boring. In 2025 Christian delivers a variation in the Argus: “the most alive person I’ve ever encountered.” The compliment has become a brand. Emre has been using it as the centerpiece anecdote about her marriage at least since the NYRB interview. The repetition is a tell. People who keep producing the same line about their marriage are usually defending a position.
The jokes are sharper than settled jokes. “Responsible and conscientious” against “self-indulgent and daydreaming.” “I wish I were his boss.” “I think I’m perfect.” “Christian mostly hangs out with zombies.” A secure couple can joke this way. So can a fraying one. The Argus piece sits on that line.
The comments section captures the artifact’s afterlife. In July 2025 a stranger writes a fan note: she wants to go back to Wesleyan and take their classes. In August 2025 Ken Eisner asks whether it is still right to call them a couple. In January 2026 “Observer” notes the six-month divorce. The piece has become public evidence of something the participants did not want it to be.
The Hardwick connection. Emre’s 2022 essay anatomized the “egotists of affirmation” Hardwick scorned, the smooth and undamaged people whose surfaces produce thinner writing than the shattered. The Argus piece is that egotism. Two professors in love. Look at our kids. Look at our balance. Look at our banter. By Hardwick’s logic, this performance is what cannot last. Hardwick said it. Emre quoted it. Then Emre performed the thing Hardwick warned against.
The most charitable reading: Emre believed the marriage sound in February. Something happened between February and August. Marriages can collapse fast.
The less charitable reading: the public performance was already a defense. The Valentine’s Day photo shoot was the kind of thing couples do when they need the relationship to be more visible than it is felt. The repetition of the “never boring” line across years was working harder than a healthy line works. The Argus piece reads, from the vantage of August 2025, as the artifact of a marriage maintained for the public after it had stopped being maintained in private.
Either reading is sad. Both raise the question Emre raised about Hardwick’s interviews: anxiety about being an egotist of affirmation. Hardwick lived through this. Emre wrote about it. Then she found out what it is.
The Argus piece will outlast the marriage by decades. The Wikipedia entry will note the dates: married 2014, divorced August 2025. Some future graduate student writing about Emre will pull the Argus interview out of the archive and use it the way Emre used Hardwick’s letter to McCarthy — as the artifact through which the critic’s voice betrays the wife’s. The wife/critic/mistress triangle has a way of finding its analysts.
The 2022 NYRB essay on Elizabeth Hardwick performs the literary-critic paradox. The sacred values are literature, women’s voices, the wife’s tragedy, and the moral weight of judgment. The status game beneath: who counts as Hardwick’s heir at the NYRB. Emre wins that contest by writing the essay. The contest is not waged in the open. It runs through careful reading, feminist understanding, and respect for the dead. The reader cannot easily call this status seeking without sounding philistine, which is what makes it good status work.
The interview with Lauren Kane names the paradox without dispelling it. Emre says the critic differs from the academic by working through “charismatic authority.” She is naming the game while playing it. Pinsof predicts this move. When a signal becomes too readable, the signaler reframes or buries it. Naming the charisma reframes it as honest self-awareness rather than charisma. The naming is itself charismatic. Saying “I’m a status seeker” hands you status by exempting you from the accusation.
The wife/critic/mistress triangle is a status claim dressed as analysis. The argument that the critic must not be the wife places the critic above the wife in the implicit ranking. This is the same paradox as “we don’t care about status.” Emre claims a position of freedom from the wife’s compromised existence. The freedom is the status. She gains the status by claiming not to seek it. The claim hides under apparent feminist concern for the wife’s plight. The wife pays the rhetorical price so the critic can be elevated.
The “alarmingly attracted to creatures of the will” line is the paradox in pure form. Self-identification with high-status, dangerous, world-burning characters, softened by “alarmingly.” The self-deprecation is the cover. She tells readers she belongs to the class of the artistically interesting, the wound-tight, the never-boring, while signaling she knows it is a fraught claim. Stated bare, the signal collapses. “I am the kind of woman who burns through marriages” inverts. “I am alarmingly attracted to that type” preserves the claim while burying the boast. The boast survives because nobody is supposed to see it as a boast.
The “shattered produce better writing than egotists of affirmation” line is a sacred value that stabilizes a status game. The sacred value: suffering produces art. The status game: among literary women, the divorced and broken outrank the smoothly married. Pinsof’s claim is that sacred values track real status acquisition while appearing to track something else. Emre offered this sacred value in 2022 as Hardwick’s pyrrhic victory. In 2026 it positions her own coming work as a beneficiary of the divorce. The sacred value was already prepared. The infrastructure for her next phase was built years before she might need it.
The Argus piece is paradox theater turned visible. “That’s what being a critic is: contribute nothing while criticizing everything.” The line states the paradox without disguise. She performs self-deprecation while claiming the highest position in the room. “Are we the best couple you’ve talked to” is the paradox at full strength. They compete to be the most uncompetitive couple. They claim status through charming domestic banter. The status game has to stay buried. When it becomes common knowledge, it collapses. The Argus piece sits on the edge of that collapse. The divorce six months later pushes it over. “I wish I were his boss” stops reading as charming banter and starts reading as the wife’s grievance. The original status game flips. The piece is now evidence against the marriage rather than evidence of it. Pinsof’s vampire-in-daylight image fits exactly. The piece turned to ash when common knowledge arrived.
The husband line is the clearest case of signal degradation. In 2022, Christian’s “married me so life would never be boring” reads as a charming aside. In 2025, it returns in different form: “the most alive person I’ve ever encountered.” Signals get reused until they become readable as signals. The repetition of this compliment across nearly a decade is the pattern Pinsof predicts will collapse. The recipient starts to notice the line is being recycled. The line stops being a spontaneous compliment and becomes a brand. The paradox erodes through overuse.
The reader of the 2022 essay benefits from the deception. This is Pinsof’s symbiotic deception. The reader gets to feel literarily serious, attuned to women’s experience, sophisticated about the wife/critic/mistress triangle. The reader benefits from not noticing the status game. The deception persists because both sides profit. The interview with Lauren Kane is the symbiotic exchange staged. Lauren provides the questions that let Emre perform her charisma. Lauren gains proximity. Emre gains the platform. The reader gains the literary content. Nobody points out the status work. The “we all take our wins where we can get them” closing line seals the paradox by claiming common cause with the reader.
The “anxiety about being an egotist of affirmation” question is the Pinsofian artifact. Emre asks whether Hardwick was anxious about being an egotist of affirmation. The asking is the artifact. Naming the trap is part of the trap. Emre frames Hardwick’s loss as having produced the deeper writing. That framing is itself a sacred value: pain elevates art. The 2026 application sits ready. Emre’s divorce now positions her to produce the deeper writing she has been preparing to claim. The argument she made about Hardwick will be available to be made about her.
Pinsof says nihilism, the skepticism of sacred values, threatens humans because it exposes the status game. The Hardwick essay treats the literary tradition with reverence. The interview defends criticism as a high calling. The Argus piece treats marriage and family as sacred. All three artifacts stand inside sacred values. The divorce does not erase the sacred values. It shifts which one Emre will reach for next. The likely bet is that the next piece reaches for the sacred value of suffering producing art, with Hardwick or some adjacent figure as cover. Pinsof’s framework predicts that the new piece will arrive draped in literary virtue. The status work will run underneath, where neither writer nor reader is supposed to see it.