Reading Emily Apter in View of Inter-American Studies
Reading Emily Apter in View of Inter-American Studies

Summary/Abstract: Translation scholars and literary comparatists will, I trust, have observed with interest the rapid expansion of the new series ‘Translation/transnation’, edited by Emily Apter and published by Princeton University Press. In the twelfth volume, the editor makes her own series debut with The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), a book with an inviting title. The ‘translation zone’ is the author’s ‘theoretical mainstay’ (Apter: 5), derived from a translation of one of Walter Benjamin’s profound aperçus, and the ‘new comparative literature’ is traced to a development from ‘German-based philology’, which Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach brought with them to Istanbul University where they and other refugees helped to implement Mustapha Kemal Atatürk’s policy of modernization in the 1930s and 1940s. In Apter’s view, the teaching of literature based on Christian or Greco-Roman premises or both to a non-Christian audience outside the tradition of classical antiquity resulted in a secular humanist pursuit to which Edward Said responded with enthusiasm. There is, therefore, Apter argues, a specific tradition of secular humanism which inspires both postcolonial studies and her own new comparative literature.

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