Bridging (and Bridging) (and Bridging) the Gap Between Lit-Crit and the General Public

OK, so the big low-stakes online distraction for people in roughly my circles was the profile of scholar-critic Merve Emre in Business Insider. Just the fact that Business Insider felt the need to notice a book critic tells you that she’s very famous and productive. I don’t have anything much that I want to say about the piece or about her work. I can look at the piece and I can generate a reading that is uncharitable to her, and I can look at the piece and I can generate a reading that is charitable. The bushels and bushels of sour grapes that the profile has produced from other people on social media — I can’t generate a charitable reading of that. Like, comrades, stop freaking out every time somebody in our field has the good luck to get famous. It reinforces the general impression that we’re all losers.

(I did find one part of the profile interesting and poignant. Emre is talking about her reluctance to be profiled, and she describes how there’s one way to tell her story where it’s just another example of an awkward immigrant kid with a “unibrow” who builds a sanctuary for herself out of work, which means that as an adult she works 9-12 hours a day, which tends to generate a certain amount of career momentum. I wondered to myself why, in my own awkward adolescence — beset by fat and a complete helplessness before social signals, rather than unibrow and cultural distance — it never really occurred to me to try this. I guess it’s because, for me, writing consists so often in a showdown with imaginary haters; there’s no sense that it offers a refuge from other people’s hostility. Still, hey, if you can make that work, good for you.)

Here’s the part that I want to talk about. The “hook” of the piece is that Emre is unusual because she is trying to bridge the gap between professional literary criticism and the “general public.” I certainly agree that she is doing this, in that she publishes in general-interest publications, writes clearly and engagingly, doesn’t use jargon when she doesn’t have to, uses social media well, etc. My point is, this isn’t unusual, and it’s weird how often it’s framed as a rarity. (I joked on Bluesky that what would really surprise everybody is a guy who’s like “I’m going to blow up the bridge between literary criticism and the general public.”) Why do we have the sense that this is undone work? Why does it feel natural to frame the idea of it as a surprise?