Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017) and The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018), and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic , Harper's Magazine , The New York Times Magazine , and other publications. [1] [2] [3]
In 2023, Emre was named the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University as well as director of the school's Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. [4]
Emre was born in Adana, Turkey. [5] She graduated in 2003 from Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School in Port Washington, New York. [6]
After graduating in 2007 from Harvard, where she concentrated in government, Emre worked for six months as a marketing consultant at Bain & Company. [7] [8] Emre says that she was a "terrible consultant" and spent most of her time at Bain studying for the literature Graduate Record Examinations under her desk. [8] It was at Bain that Emre first took the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, which would later be the subject of her second work of nonfiction, The Personality Brokers. [8]
Emre earned her PhD in English literature from Yale University and thereafter joined the English department faculty at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. [9] In 2018, she was appointed an associate professor of American literature at Oxford University. [10]
Emre has written extensively about the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante, including a lengthy essay on Ferrante's collaboration with HBO on the television series My Brilliant Friend , based on Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels . [3] Ferrante, a famously private author who uses an alias, agreed to field questions for Emre's essay on the HBO series, resulting in a two-month correspondence between the two. [3] She has argued against the position taken by other writers and critics, including Alexander Chee, that Ferrante's identity is irrelevant to her work; Emre contends that it is "precisely [Ferrante's] refusal of the biographical, and her subsequent representation of that refusal, that has lodged the biographical ever deeper into the heart of what she writes." [11]
Emre's literary criticism focuses principally on "form and style", which she contends is missing from much of today's criticism. [12] "I continue to be surprised by how few critics actually engage with the text itself, how so much of the criticism is just a projection of people's feelings and a little bit of hand waving at plot and theme", Emre has said. [12]
In 2017, Emre published Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press). The Los Angeles Review of Books said that Paraliterary is about "bad readers", and "is appropriately conscious that throughout the 20th century, a disproportionate number of readers labeled bad were female." [13] Emre published The Personality Brokers (Penguin Random House) a year later; it is a historical and biographical account of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers' invention of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). [14] She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline, and is reportedly working on a book to be titled The Female Cool, about "cold, cruel, unsentimental, unempathetic women writers and artists." [7]
The Personality Brokers generally received favorable reviews. The New York Times called the work "inventive and beguiling". [15] The Wall Street Journal called it a "riveting" book to which Emre brought "the skills of a detective, cultural critic, historian, scientist and biographer". [16] The Personality Brokers was listed in the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 and named one of The Economist's "books of the year" for 2018. [17] [18]
However, Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker, criticized Emre for using the "wrong context" to analyze the MBTI's historical antecedents and took issue with her credentials for critiquing the MBTI, arguing that "professors are the last people who should object to society's people-sorting operations." [19] Louis Menand, himself a professor, in turn faced criticism for his review, including the charge that Menand betrayed a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how the MBTI was intended to be used. [20]
Emre is married and has two children. [21]
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Year | Award | Result | Ref |
---|---|---|---|
2019 | Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages & Literature | Recipient | [23] |
2021 | Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism | Recipient | [24] |
2021 | Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing | Recipient |
In psychology and sociology, socionics is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism.
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a pseudoscientific self-report questionnaire that claims to indicate differing "psychological types". The test assigns a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result representing one of sixteen possible types, such as "INFP" or "ESTJ".
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions often ran contrary to those of her contemporaries.
Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire. It was first introduced in the book Please Understand Me. The KTS is closely associated with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); however, there are significant practical and theoretical differences between the two personality questionnaires and their associated different descriptions.
Joan Barbara Acocella was an American dance critic and author. From 1998 to 2019, she was dance critic for The New Yorker. She also wrote for The New York Review of Books for 33 years and authored books on dance, literature, and psychology.
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year. Isabel Briggs Myers typed herself as an INFP (Mediator).
Katharine Cook Briggs was an American writer who was the co-creator, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, of an inventory of a widely popular personality type system known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Daniel Adam Mendelsohn is an American author, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books, and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic. As one of the main film critics for The New Yorker magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, Gilliatt was known for her detailed descriptions and evocative reviews. A writer of short stories, novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays, Gilliatt was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).
Elizabeth Wagele (1939–2017) was an American artist, musician, and writer of books on the Enneagram of Personality and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Diane Williams is an American author, primarily of short stories. She lives in New York City and is the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. She is the author of eleven books, including How High? — That High, for which she was interviewed by Merve Emre in The New Yorker. Her book The Collected Stories of Diane Williams was published by Soho Press in 2018.
Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American clinical psychologist, educator, and author interested in personality development and culture. In 2008, her research revealed a flaw in scholarly and popular accounts regarding people displaying traits of introversion and extraversion.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual.
Ann Goldstein is an American editor and translator from the Italian language. She is best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. She was the panel chair for translated fiction at the US National Book Award in 2022. She was awarded the PEN Renato Poggioli prize in 1994 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008.
Ravenna Mathews Helson was an American psychologist known for her research on the psychology of women and creativity. Dacher Keltner has described her as "a pioneer in the study of women's lives".
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study is a widely-reviewed 2022 nonfiction book written by literary scholar John Guillory.