What Will She Do?: Merve Emre on Elif Batuman’s Either / Or

Three one-hour sessions: May 5, 12, and 19. All sessions will start at 5pm EDT.

In the final pages of Elif Batuman’s comic novel Either / Or, her college-aged protagonist, Selin, reads Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady on a bus in Turkey and wonders about her own potential as a novelistic subject. Her questions will mirror ours as we conclude the seminar series: What attributes, if any, distinguish the protagonist of a twenty-first century novel from her predecessors? What stories are worth telling and from whose point of view? What is the distinction between writing autobiography and writing fiction? Where can the novel go from here? The final meeting will feature a guest appearance by Batuman.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, where she also hosts the podcast “The Critic and Her Publics.”

In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James recalled the challenge presented to him by the novel’s main character, Isabel Archer. “By what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” he wondered. “Well, what will she do?” This seminar takes James's question—“What will she do?”—as crucial to the novel, a genre of fiction that has been particularly interested in how young women determine what to do with their lives. Reading across six novels—Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Elif Batuman’s Either / Or—we will trace the history of the novel through its evolving representations of sex, desire, race, class, and a distinctly female consciousness.

Event Venue

Online