Merve Emre, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, presents the keynote lecture for the A Room of Her Own Symposium. The lecture is titled "Virginia Woolf's Incomparable Female Gaze."
Virginia Woolf is one of the great social theorists of the school. The fact that she has never been described as such testifies to the two exclusions of which she speaks in A Room of One’s Own (1929)—the exclusion of women from the university and the exclusion of fiction from the received genres of knowledge. That fiction may have an equal or greater claim to knowledge than social scientific writing is readily granted by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who credits Woolf, and Woolf alone, with telling the truth about gender and education. This talk, part fiction, part fact, puts Woolf and Bourdieu into dialogue to grasp what is truly at stake in her splendid 1929 essay: the life of the mind and the death of the imagination in the university, for women and men alike.
Merve Emre's books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and head of special projects at The New York Review of Books.
Free. A 5:30 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. Details: clarkart.edu/events
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