Interviews
Introduction: A Roundtable with Emily Apter
On February 9, 2007, Professor Emily Apter of New York University spoke with graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis about the history of the discipline of Comparative Literature, of bilingualism in the United States, of linguistic activism, of Apter's multilingual and multicultural upbringing, of space and cultural "zones," and, finally, of critical theory. As the interview shows, Apter moves from one topic to the next with ease, tracing the same liminal zones in her thinking that she identifies in her work. Speaking animatedly and often playfully, she embodied the intellectual openness that has become the hallmark of her career: she crafts treaties for one-time enemies, joining dusty "outdated" theories to contemporary ones, moving as diplomat and peace-broker across the sometimes uneasy borders separating political activism from abstract philosophy.
Her intellectual fluidity is based, in part, on an extensive and prolific professional history. Professor of French and Associate Faculty member of Comparative Literature at NYU, Apter is a distinguished comparative literature theorist. She edits the critically-acclaimed book series Translation/Transnation (Princeton UP), and serves on the editorial boards of the high-profile journals PMLA, October, Comparative Literature, and Signs. Apter's wide ranging interests, including 19th- and 20th-century French literatures, cultural and critical theories of transnationality, linguistics, and translation, and Francophone literature, make her work significant to a breadth of disciplines and conceptual paradigms. Within comparative literature's perpetual identity crisis, Apter is a key figure and an articulate voice. She possesses a comprehensive vision for the future of comparative work—a vision that stems from an intensely personal set of beliefs and values, but that is also grounded in the tradition of Comparative Literature's "founding fathers," Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach.
Apter began her publishing career with a profound interest in the intersection between psychoanalysis and politics, exemplified in her early work: Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Cornell; 1991) and Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, co-edited with William Pietz (Cornell; 1991). In 1999, she published Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (University of Chicago Press), a text that deftly answers the question: "What is the national character of the multinational nation?" In response, Apter hypothesizes the multinational nation as both defined and created by the technologically-mediated post-national subject; blurring the boundaries between citizenship and cultural cosmopolitanism, Apter explores the post-colonial psyche of nation-states seen through the eyes of their cultural Others. Cultural and linguistic cosmopolitanism again takes the stage in her most recent text, The Translation Zone (Princeton; 2006), where she argues equally persuasively for two seemingly incompatible premises: "nothing is translatable" and "everything is translatable." The Translation Zone optimistically argues for more permeable linguistic boundaries in an increasingly globalized world-a world that can be appropriately accounted for and measured by a new comparative studies.
During her conversation with Chris Boehm, Tracy Graves, and Kate Parker, Apter addressed the political, philosophical and institutional challenges facing comparative studies today. Problems with language are, for Apter, intimately interconnected with the complex structure of sociocultural identity. Language can be an instrument of hegemony, the potential for a proliferation of cultural perspectives, and a home-like location at once constrictive and comforting. Whether answering such complications by promoting a more inclusive multilingual curriculum in the United States, or tackling the complexities of Lacanian and Derridean linguistics, she focuses on the intricacies of what she rightly terms "language fear." The edited transcript we provide here represents only a limited scope of her panoramic work, but offers a sampling of one of Comparative Literature's most insightful contemporary thinkers.
By Kate Parker, Chris Boehm, and Tracy Graves