The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities welcomes New Yorker writer Merve Emre for a free event at 101 Archer. 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 possible, brings these practices to the fore and shows how they produce a hyper-disciplined, minimally individualized variety of pleasure. 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. 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. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.