In August, West Virginia University announced that it would be dissolving its Department of World Languages, Literature and Linguistics. And a couple months after that, my school Middlebury College, chose to eliminate a faculty position in its creative writing department. As someone studying English Literature, and who cares deeply about the future of humanities education, I was curious to talk to someone who has been thinking about what the study of the humanities looks like in today's world. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She was also a judge for The 2022 International Booker Prize. I’ve read her essays on various literary topics at The New Yorker, and other publications and it’s obvious that her criticism strives to innovate literary study for a changing world. I’ve been talking a lot about criticism on this show this year. I spoke to Christian Lorentzen over the summer about the future of literary criticism, an art that’s been required to reinvent and revitalize itself over the past few years. And my conversations with Jerome Lowenthal and Ethan Iverson focused on how classical music and jazz are received. I think studying the way we approach and talk about art and culture is crucial to the function of the humanities and this conversation gets to the heart of that.
Merve and I start by talking about the school and the trends that literature departments are seeing, but then we progress to a larger discussion about access to the humanities. Merve is a strong advocate for treating aesthetic experience as a social good, and this takes us to the end of our conversation where we try to articulate how the academy and public media, and social media can simultaneously further the reach and scope of humanities education and dissemination in their own ways. This was another work of audio criticism. Regardless of whether you’re interested in literature or culture, the topics we discussed are ubiquitous in today’s society, and if there’s one throughline in all the episodes of Cultural Mixtapes, it’s the importance of art in our world.
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