Emily Apter

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.

She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University.

Between 1993 and 2002 she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Cornell University.

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.

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.

Emily Apter is a contributor to the recent debate about world literature theory.

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

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.

She talks about "small-p politics": "this micro, unexceptional politics is often barely perceptible, but it is there nonetheless" 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.

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".

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.

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."

She dives in debates of postcolonial studies, gender, identity and cultural studies.

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.

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".

Emily Apter 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.