Merve Emre
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Thursday, Jan 23, 2025 7pm - 8pm
Details
The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities welcomes New Yorker writer Merve Emre for a free event at 101 Archer on Thursday January 23 at 7:00 pm. This talk argues that American miniaturism, as represented by contemporary forms like “flash fiction” or “the short-short story,” emerges as the primary aesthetic strategy for foregrounding the disciplined study of grammar over figuration. In the fiction of Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, and Garielle Lutz, grammar is inseparable from gender, and gender is inseparable from practices of literary labor that are regularly trivialized, devalued, and rendered invisible: translating, editing, fact checking, transcribing, type-setting, and teaching composition. Too close reading, or reading at the smallest scale possible, brings these practices to the fore and shows how they produce a hyper-disciplined, minimally individualized variety of pleasure.
