Search results for ""Author Merve Emre""

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Book SynopsisLiterature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, good readers attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre's tongue-in-cheek term, bad readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassa

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Book SynopsisA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEARHistory that reads like biography that reads like a novel a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type' New York TimesBrilliant and savage' Philip HensherAn unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter fiction writers with no formal training in psychology and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond.The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It has been harnessed by Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of extraversion vs. introversion, thinking vs. feeling has inspired online dating platforms and Buzzfeed quizzes alike. And yet despite the test''s widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $500 million industry, struggle to account for its success no less validate its results. How did the Myers-Briggs insinuate itself into our jobs, ouTrade Review‘A tremendous piece of storytelling and an acute analysis of the craving of the contemporary, secular imagination for certainties’ Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times ‘Emre is a masterful and nuanced storyteller. What’s Your Type is an impressive work of scholarship, not just a biography of two fascinating women but also a tightly argued and sweeping history of how the conception of personality changed throughout the upheavals of the 20th century’ New Statesman ‘The story behind the Myers-Briggs test proves an interesting one, and is told with considerable relish, vim and some savage comedy by Emre … This is a very funny book, and properly angry about the stupidity of the entire exercise’Philip Hensher, Spectator ‘Emre’s careful investigations of the tool’s bizarre origins and alarming impact weave a compelling narrative that recounts the rise of twentieth-century managerial and personnel-theory science with the gritty wistfulness of a John Steinbeck novel’ Nature ‘Emre’s book begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalizing suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store. Inventive and beguiling… the revelations she uncovers are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre. This is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel – a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type’ New York Times ‘This is a sparkling biography – not of a person, but of a popular personality tool. Merve Emre deftly exposes the hidden origins of the MBTI and the seductive appeal and fatal flaws of personality types’ Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg ‘Emre’s thought-provoking book is full of interest and she brings vigour to her investigation of Myers-Briggs.’The Times ‘A brilliant cultural history of the personality-assessment industry’ Economist

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Book Synopsis"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." So begins Virginia Woolf’s beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been considered Woolf’s masterpiece. A pivotal work of literary modernism, its simple plot—centred on an upper-class Londoner preparing to give a party—is complicated by Woolf’s satire of the English social system. For decades, Woolf’s rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists and scholars alike. In this annotated volume based on the original British edition, acclaimed essayist and Oxford don Merve Emre mines Woolf’s diaries and notes on writing to take us into the making of Mrs. Dalloway, revealing the novel’s artistry and astonishing originality. Alongside her generous commentary, Emre offers hundreds of illustrations and little-seen photographs from Woolf’s life. The result is not only an essential volume for students and Woolf devotees but an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature.Trade Review"[An] amazing, illustrated annotated edition… Unlike a lot of these books where you have to flick to the back or there are interrupting footnotes at the bottom, this is very usable, very navigable." -- Leo Robson, Summer reading round up - BBC Radio 4 Open Book"[Emre’s] introduction combines personal testimony about her relationship to the novel—she is so devoted that she retyped Woolf’s manuscript for this edition—with deep research into its genesis... if you can read the novel a little more analytically, if you seek instruction on how it works and why, then this new edition will tell you all that you wish to know... Among its many illustrations, it includes a selection of maps, tracing the paths that Clarissa, Septimus and the other characters might have walked that day in 1923. The next time I’m in London with a few hours to spare, this is the Mrs. Dalloway for me." -- Jeremy McCarter - The Wall Street Journal"The Annotated Mrs Dalloway is timely… Emre finds Woolf’s life surfacing everywhere. Woolf’s thoughts, and her self, are irrepressible... Emre has created a kaleidoscope of revealing and illuminating images." -- Henry Oliver - UnHerd"Each edition has its own magnificence… Emre’s edition is a seminar, a reading experience masterfully directed by a warm voice urging attention and suggesting interpretation... As more Woolf books emerge from copyright, we can expect many more editions. I hope that they are as consistent in purpose and as pleasant to explore as Fernald’s and Emre’s... Emre, unlike Fernald, is not a Woolf scholar, but she is something else well suited to the task: a storyteller." -- Emily Kopley - Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisAn enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: Exclusion, selection, reflection, representationthese are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.Trade Review“Cultural Capital has become a stealth classic. . . . The canon, Guillory argued, wasn’t an impregnable monument, but an imaginary construct that had always been contested.” * New York Times *“Guillory is the profession’s great disenchanter. He came to prominence with his landmark study Cultural Capital . . . a brilliant act of desublimation aimed at an earlier crisis of authority in the humanities, often referred to as the ‘canon wars.’” * The Nation *“Cultural Capital is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of Guillory’s work has been to engage with, but stand back from, the issues roiling contemporary academic debates, setting them in a longer historical perspective and bringing a form of distanced, sociologically informed theory to their analysis.” * London Review of Books *“A brilliantly iconoclastic exploration of the current state of literary criticism.” * The Review of English Studies *“Cultural Capital is a distinctive contribution to the ubiquitous discussion of the ‘crisis’ in the humanities. Neither jeremiad nor apology, Guillory’s book is a densely reasoned sociological analysis of literary canon formation.” * Modernism/modernity *“The suppleness of the book's argument overall places Guillory just where it feels right to be. He does not argue for the demolition of the canon or for the abandonment of aesthetic judgment; he advocates, rather, a struggle to disjoin the study of literature from markers of class prestige and to open up universal access to it.” * Modern Fiction Studies *“Cultural Capital is a rich book. It rewards the reader with original and often surprising interpretations of buried structural relations of exclusion that are objectified in the canon debate… Guillory is concerned about who reads and who writes; he is also concerned about for whom writers write and under what conditions.” * South Atlantic Review *“Cultural Capital takes possession of the whole familiar canon debate and transforms it into something rich and strange, new and exciting.” * English Literature in Transition *“Not merely an intelligent voice in the canon debate, Guillory is among a short list of authors… who have provided the signal service of helping us in the academy to understand in a profound way the function in society as a whole of the institution we serve. . . . Guillory places the canon wars in the context of the social changes that, he argues, have produced the current crisis of the humanities.” * College Literature *“The signature of Cultural Capital… consists in the close attention Guillory pays to the institutional and pedagogic underpinnings of literary critical and theoretical programmes.” * Cultural Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction to the New Edition by Merve Emre Preface Acknowledgments Part One: Critique 1 Canonical and Noncanonical: The Current Debate Part Two: Case Studies 2 Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon 3 Ideology and Canonical Form: The New Critical Canon 4 Literature after Theory: The Lesson of Paul de Man Part Three: Aesthetics 5 The Discourse of Value: From Adam Smith to Barbara Herrnstein Smith Notes Index

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Book SynopsisRediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artistsWith a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault linesMax Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright.In Amsterdam, among Harry’s papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining “King Alfred,” a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming “to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society.” Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help.Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider’s view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed.“It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb . . . . This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.” —Chester Himes“Magnificent . . . obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class.” —John Fowles“If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.” —Walter Mosely

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Book SynopsisIn The Ferrante Letters, four critics create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Elena Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, they strike a tone that falls between the seminar and the book club.Trade ReviewWith fiery insight and feminist spirit, they have written a fitting companion to Ferrante’s books. * Booklist (starred review) *The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of character. * New Yorker *A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th century's greatest literary works at its core. * Library Journal *The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans. * Publishers Weekly *If The Ferrante Letters is meant to be an experiment in what would happen if boundaries, forms, and the shape of literary criticism were to dissolve and the opinions of critics blurred into one another, it is one that the authors recognize as both an exciting and frightening possibility. * New Republic *The Ferrante Letters gives us a unique opportunity to read—or reread—the Neapolitan novels with four distinct guides beside us, both literary and personal, posing questions and offering insights, analysis, and discussion that enrich and deepen our experience of the books. -- Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novelsThe Ferrante Letters is a smart, beautiful, often moving meditation on the experience of reading the Neapolitan Quartet. This collection of letters and essays deftly manages that tricky balance of the creative, the critical, and the personal. A magnificent accomplishment. -- Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift: A NovelThese four smart feminist critics reflect on the Neapolitan novels' exploration of women's friendship, intellectual labor, and personal lives. Reading The Ferrante Letters feels like you have stumbled upon your favorite reading group talking about your favorite author. It captures the way critical thinking should work, not in isolation but in conversation. -- Pamela Thurschwell, University of SussexIn The Ferrante Letters, expertise and passion dovetail to great effect. This absorptive, idiosyncratic book is a work of collective criticism that offers a set of rigorous, convivial, and stylish readings of its primary texts, staging the critical act as also a creative one. This book reveals that the form literary criticism takes is as important as its content. -- Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesWhile it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for fans and scholars. * Kirkus Reviews *This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary criticism. * Bookriot *If you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great introduction...Highly recommended. * Il Feminile *The Ferrante Letters is a bold, often inspiring attempt to rethink literary criticism and teaching practices on a collective basis, bridging the personal, critical and pleasurable. * Times Higher Education *I would heartily recommend The Ferrante Letters to fellow Ferrante fans, to feminist scholars, to readers interested in collective critical experiments. * Times Literary Supplement *What Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of criticism as this one. * World Literature Today *The Ferrante Letters is extremely absorbing. It’s rare to come across university-nurtured criticism, informed by theory, that is jargon-free and studded with insight. * Virginia Quarterly Review *I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us, severally or jointly, read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. -- Deidre Lynch * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Collective CriticismI. Letters (2015)My Brilliant FriendThe Story of a New NameThose Who Leave and Those Who StayThe Story of the Lost ChildII. Essays (2018)Unform, by Sarah ChihayaThe Story of a Fiction, by Katherine HillThe Queer Counterfactual, by Jill RichardsThe Cage of Authorship, by Merve EmreAfterwordAppendix: Guest Letters, by Sara Marcus, Marissa Brostoff, Lili Loofbourow, Cecily Swanson, and Amy SchillerAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography

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Book SynopsisIn The Ferrante Letters, four critics create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Elena Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, they strike a tone that falls between the seminar and the book club.Trade ReviewWith fiery insight and feminist spirit, they have written a fitting companion to Ferrante’s books. * Booklist (starred review) *The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of character. * New Yorker *A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th century's greatest literary works at its core. * Library Journal *The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans. * Publishers Weekly *If The Ferrante Letters is meant to be an experiment in what would happen if boundaries, forms, and the shape of literary criticism were to dissolve and the opinions of critics blurred into one another, it is one that the authors recognize as both an exciting and frightening possibility. * New Republic *The Ferrante Letters gives us a unique opportunity to read—or reread—the Neapolitan novels with four distinct guides beside us, both literary and personal, posing questions and offering insights, analysis, and discussion that enrich and deepen our experience of the books. -- Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novelsThe Ferrante Letters is a smart, beautiful, often moving meditation on the experience of reading the Neapolitan Quartet. This collection of letters and essays deftly manages that tricky balance of the creative, the critical, and the personal. A magnificent accomplishment. -- Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift: A NovelThese four smart feminist critics reflect on the Neapolitan novels' exploration of women's friendship, intellectual labor, and personal lives. Reading The Ferrante Letters feels like you have stumbled upon your favorite reading group talking about your favorite author. It captures the way critical thinking should work, not in isolation but in conversation. -- Pamela Thurschwell, University of SussexIn The Ferrante Letters, expertise and passion dovetail to great effect. This absorptive, idiosyncratic book is a work of collective criticism that offers a set of rigorous, convivial, and stylish readings of its primary texts, staging the critical act as also a creative one. This book reveals that the form literary criticism takes is as important as its content. -- Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesWhile it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for fans and scholars. * Kirkus Reviews *This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary criticism. * Bookriot *If you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great introduction...Highly recommended. * Il Feminile *The Ferrante Letters is a bold, often inspiring attempt to rethink literary criticism and teaching practices on a collective basis, bridging the personal, critical and pleasurable. * Times Higher Education *I would heartily recommend The Ferrante Letters to fellow Ferrante fans, to feminist scholars, to readers interested in collective critical experiments. * Times Literary Supplement *What Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of criticism as this one. * World Literature Today *The Ferrante Letters is extremely absorbing. It’s rare to come across university-nurtured criticism, informed by theory, that is jargon-free and studded with insight. * Virginia Quarterly Review *I was thoroughly compelled by the rigor and candor with which Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards explore the intimacies that readers create through and with novels—and by their readiness in The Ferrante Letters to put their own reading lives under the microscope while they do so. I want to continue to read with these four critics, jointly and severally. They certainly should be your companions as well, dear readers, the next time all of us, severally or jointly, read Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. -- Deidre Lynch * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Collective CriticismI. Letters (2015)My Brilliant FriendThe Story of a New NameThose Who Leave and Those Who StayThe Story of the Lost ChildII. Essays (2018)Unform, by Sarah ChihayaThe Story of a Fiction, by Katherine HillThe Queer Counterfactual, by Jill RichardsThe Cage of Authorship, by Merve EmreAfterwordAppendix: Guest Letters, by Sara Marcus, Marissa Brostoff, Lili Loofbourow, Cecily Swanson, and Amy SchillerAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography

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