Opening of Lecture Series “New Directions in Literary Postcolonial Studies”

organized together with

Center for the Humanities, Utrecht Research Institute for History and Culture OGC, Utrecht

Onderzoekschool Literatuurwetenschap, OSL

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Lecture by Emily Apter (NYU) “Translating the 'World' in World Literature” Organized within the new lecture series “New Directions in Literary Postcolonial Studies” Convenors Birgit M. Kaiser (Utrecht) and Emmanuelle Radar (Utrecht) Date/Time: Monday, 20 June 2011, 10.00-13.30 Location: Drift 21, 0.05 (Sweelinckzaal), Utrecht Introduction: 10.00-10.30

“New Directions in Literary Postcolonial Studies” (Birgit M. Kaiser, Utrecht) Lecture: 10.30-12.00 “Translating the ‘World’ in World Literature” (Emily Apter, NYU) Coffeebreak: 12.00-12.30 Round Table: 12.30-13.30

Participants responding to Emily Apter’s morning lecture: Hans Bertens (Utrecht), Robert Folger (Utrecht), Theo D’Haen (Leuven)

Please register at cfh@uu.nl using ‘apter lecture’ as a subject of your mail.

For more information see: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl/p/agenda_10.html

Related Masterclass Emily Apter (NYU)

“-abilities of Untranslatability” organized with OSL

The masterclass will discuss central positions of Emily Apter's new book Against World Literature? The Politics of Untranslatability in Comparative Literature (forthcoming). The book engages in a critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Dimock) arguing that they construct their curricula on the assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what she calls the “untranslatable” are, according to Apter, insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Edouard Glissant, the aim of the new book is to activate "Untranslatability" as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature and sound its bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, and the poetics of translational difference. In the masterclass, students will discuss texts from the new book as well as selected texts from the earlier publication The Translation Zone (2006), as well as chapters from Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s abilities (2008). In preparation of the master class, students are invited to send in focused questions beforehand. Reader will be made available via OSL, register via : osl-fgw@uva.nl Emily Apter teaches at NYU since 2002, after having taught in French and Comparative Literature at UCLA, Cornell University, UC-Davis, Penn and Williams College. At NYU she teaches in the departments of French, English and Comparative Literature, specializing in courses on French Critical Theory, the History and Theory of Comparative Literature, the problem of "Francophonie," translation studies, French feminism, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century French literature. Recent essays have focused on paradigms of "oneworldedness," the problem of self-property and self-ownership, literary world-systems and the translatability of genres, and how to think about translation as a form of intellectual labor.

Date/Time: Tuesday, 21 June 2011, 11.00-13.30

Location: Janskerkhof 13, zaal 0.06,

Utrecht