Paul Holdengräber is joined by Merve Emre on episode 170 of The Quarantine Tapes. Merve spent time in quarantine working on her upcoming annotated version of Mrs. Dalloway. She tells Paul about her extraordinary experience of getting closer to that text by transcribing it in full as she annotated and considers how reading an annotated edition is always an act of rereading.

Paul asks Merve about her writing on Critical Love Studies and the work of Sam See. Then, they discuss the applications of literary pedagogy outside of traditional literary spaces and the questions that those applications raise. Finally, Merve tells Paul about the new documentary, Persona, based on her book The Personality Brokers and what that project reveals about the growing role of personality assessments.

Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of several books, including The Personality Brokers (selected by the New York Times book critics as one of the best books of 2018), and a regular critic for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Her next book is The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, forthcoming from Liveright in August 2021.

Credits:

Paul Holdengraber - Co-Creator, Host, OLA Director
Anthony Audi - Co-Creator, Researcher, OLA Director
Alejandro Cohen - Co-Creator, Producer, Composer
Christian Pitt - Production Coordinator 
Erin Cooney - Copy, Production
Dublab Team