![\"Merve](\"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/humanities-institute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/82\/2024\/03\/IMG_6416-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nOn March 8, Emre spoke to a crowd at the new JHU Bloomberg Center at 555 Penn in DC, starting with the provocation in her title: “Why I Feel Bad for Men, or Reading \u2018A Room of One\u2019s Own\u2019 with Pierre Bourdieu.\u201d Here again, Emre focuses on how different artists have managed to wrest truths from their own fictions. In particular, says Emre, Virginia Woolf\u2014whose Annotated Mrs. Dalloway<\/a><\/em> Emre recently edited and introduced\u2014imagines the need for a literary tradition of their own for women, one without either “the avarice and the comfortable desperation of men” as they have learned to compete within the modern university. But for Woolf in the 1920s as much as for Emre almost 100 years later, “The question of how the modern woman will write cannot be disentangled from the question of how she will be taught to write, or rather, where she will be taught to write.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n As a director of writing at Wesleyan’s Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism<\/a>, no doubt this matter has a ring of urgency for Emre. In her own turn to the present, this sweeping essay where fiction and fact merged, Emre’s final lines speak a warning that echoes Woolf’s Room<\/em>: “To create a tradition, it is not enough for some to toil in poverty and obscurity and for others to have a room of one\u2019s own. To create a tradition, we must turn what was once a toil for some into a pleasure for all. We must turn a room for one into an open and free space for many.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only was Emre in town to deliver two sweeping lectures (complete with Q&A with our audiences), but also to speak to some of AGHI’s fellows and faculty. On Thursday before her first talk, the Translation Circle<\/a> grad student group met with Emre and discussed the difficulties of translation, form, and linguistic context\u2014drawing on Emre’s contributions as co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Columbia UP, 2020). <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n We are immensely grateful to Merve Emre for joining AGHI for such a generous series of events this year. To read more of Emre’s work, see her website<\/a>, her profile as contributor for The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, and (coming soon) a new book forthcoming from Norton tentatively titled, Love and Other Useless Pursuits<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Posed](\"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/humanities-institute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/82\/2024\/03\/IMG_6395-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/figure>