Emily Apter

Last updated

Emily Susan Apter (born 1954) is an American academic, translator, editor and professor. Her areas of research are translation theory, language philosophy, political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, history and theory of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, and political fiction. [1] She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture [2] at New York University.

Contents

Life and career

Emily Apter is the daughter of the Yale political scientist David E. Apter. [3] Apter was married to the architectural historian Anthony Vidler, who died in October 2023. She completed her BA at Harvard University and earned her MA and her PhD at Princeton University on Comparative Literature, with focus on 19th and 20th-century French, British and German literature, theory, and history of literary criticism. [4] Between 1993 and 2002 she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Cornell University. [5] Since 2002, she is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She was appointed president of the American Comparative Literature Association for the years 2017–2018. [5] [6]

Apter is the editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, a series that approaches the literary dimension of transnationalism and puts special emphasis on the politics of language, accent, and comparative literature movements. [7]

Emily Apter is a contributor to the recent debate about world literature theory. [8] [9] [10]

She is currently working on her next book Translating in-Equality: Equivalence, Justness, Rightness, Equaliberty.

Affiliations and honours (selected)

Publications

Books authored

Unexceptional Politics, unlike her earlier works, distances itself from translation, and focuses on the language and lexicon used to talk about politics. This book has been described as a work of political philology, where she makes vast use of neologisms and alters the meaning of other terms by setting them in a whole different context. [11] She talks about "small-p politics": "this micro, unexceptional politics is often barely perceptible, but it is there nonetheless" [12] and it is what helps shape Politics with "capital p".

Against World Literature challenges a concept of World Literature that relies on a translatability assumption. [13] It focuses on topics like world literature, comparative literature, and translation studies. Apter finds it essential to pay the necessary attention to untranslatability and she argues that translation is no substitute for the original. The problems and failures in translation are unavoidable and part of the process and result in what she calls the "Untranslatables". [9]

In The Translation Zone, Apter argues how translation plays an essential role in the redefinition and establishment of a new comparative literature. The book also focuses, among other topics, on the rapid development of translation technologies and its effect on translation itself, the "language wars", and the tensions between cultural translation and textual translation. [10]

Continental Drift focuses on the French colonial and postcolonial experience, together with the fate of national literatures in an increasingly globalised world. Apter explores continental theory in a global frame, and "the dissolution of a national subject." [14] She dives in debates of postcolonial studies, gender, identity and cultural studies. [15]

Feminizing the fetish is an analysis of fetishism in turn-of-the-century French culture, with special emphasis on female fetishism. In an interdisciplinary approach, Apter explores the topic of fetishism and perversion through a narratological, New Historical, hermeneutical, feminist, and psychoanalytical lens. [16] [17]

In this work, Apter develops her thesis within the frame of poststructuralism. She focuses on sexual identity, the consciousness of language from the perspective of modern linguistic theory. She analyses Gide's use of rhetorical devices and discusses the famous "mise en abyme". [18]

Books edited

Articles (selected)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fetishism</span> Human attribution of special powers or value to an object

A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent non-material value, or powers, to an object. Talismans and amulets are related. Fetishes are often used in spiritual or religious context.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexual fetishism</span> Sexual arousal a person receives from an object or situation

Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has a fetish for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regarded as a non-pathological aid to sexual excitement, or as a mental disorder if it causes significant psychosocial distress for the person or has detrimental effects on important areas of their life. Sexual arousal from a particular body part can be further classified as partialism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodity fetishism</span> Concept in Marxist analysis

In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avital Ronell</span> American philosopher

Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristin Ross</span>

Kristin Ross is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at New York University. She is primarily known for her work on French literature and culture of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

World literature is used to refer to the total of the world's national literature and the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. In the past, it primarily referred to the masterpieces of Western European literature; however, world literature today is increasingly seen in an international context. Now, readers have access to a wide range of global works in various translations.

Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leo Spitzer</span>

Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.

Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cuckold</span> Husband of an adulterous wife

A cuckold is the husband of an adulterous wife; the wife of an adulterous husband is a cuckquean. In biology, a cuckold is a male who unwittingly invests parental effort in juveniles who are not genetically his offspring. A husband who is aware of and tolerates his wife's infidelity is sometimes called a wittol or wittold.

Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy. She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published extensively on questions of post-colonial agency, film, Algeria, area studies, autobiography, Marxism, the visual and feminist theory. She received her Ph.D in 1993 from the University of York. She has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Utah, and in 2000 began teaching at Duke University, where she is Professor of English, Literature and Women's Studies. Her theorization of subjectivity and sovereignty, including her recent work on disposability, indignity and asylum, engages with the work of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Irigaray, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Spivak. From 2007 until 2015, she was the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, and in July 2017, she was appointed to be the incoming Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, both at Duke University.

The New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) is a school within New York University (NYU) founded in 1886 by Henry Mitchell MacCracken, establishing NYU as the second academic institution in the United States to grant Ph.D. degrees on academic performance and examination. The School is housed in the Silver Center, several departments have their own buildings and houses around Washington Square. The graduate program at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, although run independently, is formally associated with the graduate school.

Gabriela Basterra is a professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at New York University. She is primarily known for her work on philosophy and literature, ethical subjectivity, rhetoric, poetry, tragedy, psychoanalysis, ethics and politics.

Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain at Princeton University, specializing in modern and contemporary Spanish America. He also serves as Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, and has directed Princeton's program in Latin American Studies since 2008. He holds a B.A. in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.

William Pietz is an intellectual historian and political activist. He is known for his scholarship related to the concept of fetishism.

Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her fields of research include classical reception, comparative literature, historical poetics, lyric theory, translation studies, Nineteenth-Century poetry, English Hellenism, and Victorian poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Divya Dwivedi</span> Indian philosopher

Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi. She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.

Jane Weinstock is an American film director and writer. Her films have been shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Her writings have been published in Art in America, Camera Obscura, m/f and October.

References

  1. ↑ "Emily Apter". NYU Arts & Science. Archived from the original on 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2021-05-10.
  2. ↑ "faculty nyu".
  3. ↑ Hevesi, Dennis (2010-05-10). "David E. Apter, Yale Political Scientist, Is Dead at 85". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2024-04-07.
  4. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae Emily S. Apter" (PDF). NYU. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
  5. 1 2 "Emily Apter". Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Archived from the original on 2021-08-01. Retrieved 2021-05-03.
  6. ↑ "Board Members". American Comparative Literature Association. Retrieved 2021-07-30.
  7. ↑ "Translation/Transnation". Princeton University Press. Archived from the original on 2021-07-31. Retrieved 2021-07-15.
  8. ↑ "Enlighten: Publications. Emily Apter. Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability". University of Glasgow. Archived from the original on 2021-08-03. Retrieved 2021-08-03.
  9. 1 2 Jones, Ellen (2014-08-06). "Against World Literature by Emily Apter". Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation. Archived from the original on 2019-05-23. Retrieved 2021-06-12.
  10. 1 2 "The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature". Princeton University Press. Archived from the original on 2021-03-01. Retrieved 2021-07-31.
  11. ↑ "Emily Apter's Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic". The Scattered Pelican. Archived from the original on 2021-04-15. Retrieved 2021-06-14.
  12. ↑ Apter, Emily S. (2018). Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. New York: Verso. p. 12. ISBN   9781784780852.
  13. ↑ Apter, Emily S. (2013). Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso. ISBN   9781844679706.
  14. ↑ Apter, Emily S. (1999). Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   0226023494.
  15. ↑ "Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects". The University of Chicago Press Books. Archived from the original on 2021-04-16. Retrieved 2021-06-12.
  16. ↑ "Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France". Cornell Open: A Global Open Access Portal. Archived from the original on 2020-10-31. Retrieved 2021-07-23.
  17. ↑ Apter, Emily S. (1991). Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France. London: Cornell University Press. JSTOR   10.7591/j.ctt207g6z5.3.
  18. ↑ Brée, Germaine (1989). "Reviewed Work: André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality by Emily S. Apter". South Atlantic Review. 54. doi:10.2307/3199816. JSTOR   3199816 – via JSTOR.
  19. ↑ "Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon". Princeton University Press. Archived from the original on 2021-06-21. Retrieved 2021-06-17.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.