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 humanly possible, brings these practices to the fore and shows how they produce a severely disciplined, minimally individualized variety of pleasure.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and  director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CBC, and The Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US / Harper Collins UK).

She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to New Literary History, PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.