Professor Emily Apter of New York University’s French Department offered an intriguing approach to the contentious arena of plagiarism in her lecture, entitled “Properties of Translation: Signature, Copyright, Textual Ownership.”
Apter’s lecture, held last Monday in the Russell House, presented translation as a genre of literary expression, allowing her to forge a conceptual bridge between this legal practice of appropriationism (incorporating the image of another artist into a new work) and appropriative practices with juridical consequences, such as plagiarism. She explained that the individualized role of the translator inevitably makes translation a practice that “throws into arrears the belief that individual writers have individual ownership of their writing.” By contrasting the ways in which translation “exults the art of the copy” and “claims to be of the original,” essentially producing shared authorship of a text, Apter linked ideological and legal questions of intellectual property, a relationship she asked the audience to consider as an element of literary theory.
Prompted by patents and copyright laws (both current trends that assert strict legal ownership of creative works), Apter opened a dialogue in which the nature of creativity itself might first be reconsidered. Before leaping into debate over the proper repercussions for artistic theft, she said, the feasibility of the theft must first be questioned. Citing philosopher Jacques Derrida, she questioned the legitimacy of “owning” language or experience, considering whether originality in these fields even exists. Apter added another facet to her query when she discussed the often-overlooked practice of imperial plagiarism: the use of indigenous art forms and images by Western producers of creative culture.
It was with this illustrative and inquiring intention in mind that Apter explored a key assumption, “I am, therefore I am owed.” Eloquently, and often humorously, she provided examples of literary figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Romain Gary and Jonathan Lethem, whose individual experiences and theories shed light on the gray areas of linguistic possession, auto-plagiarism, and even feelings of self-dispossession that arise, not necessarily from another’s theft of one’s work, but from the misunderstanding of one’s own use of another’s work.
Apter took one memorable example from the life of author Gary. He was offered the prestigious Prix Goncourt twice in his life: the first time under his true name and then under a pseudonym, Emile Ajar. Seeking to evade the Prix’s limit of one award to any author, Gary asked his nephew to pose as Ajar and accept the prize. Gary’s nephew, finding he enjoyed his role as Ajar, proceeded to blackmail his uncle into continuing his authorship under the pseudonym. Yet repetitions in theme and content led to accusations of plagiarism that plagued Gary / Ajar throughout his career, culminating in Gary’s suicide.
The momentum with which society is hurtling into the uncharted territory of Internet access and technology may complicate the dynamics of textual and artistic property even further, but it also serves in many ways to inspire Apter’s work. With the world seemingly at our fingertips, the ease with which documents and images can be viewed, reproduced, transformed or manipulated raises new issues regarding the applicability of legal procedures in the digital age. In an Internet culture of Facebook, blogs, Google, Wikipedia and cyber-dating, Apter pointed out that expectations of privacy and spaces for creative expression are undergoing transformation. Simultaneously, the Internet is illuminating new uses and forms of collaboration and cooperation amongst academics, artists, entrepreneurs and the general public. Apter asked how and, more importantly, if Internet practices of “sampling and borrowing” should enter the legal sphere.
One audience member saw the lecture, the second in the Center for the Humanities’ Spring Lecture Series, as a wake-up call to those who either fail or refuse to see the re-defined nature of artistic work in the Internet age.
“Emily Apter spoke really compellingly about how both legal and academic thinking about the production of art and ideas actually needs to catch up to the activities of artists and intellectuals themselves and embrace the basically plagiaristic quality of artistic production,” said Jason Kavett ’09
Apter’s intentions, however, lay outside providing answers to the multitude of questions she raised within her lecture. Julie Solomon, Visiting Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, saw Apter’s open-ended exploration of the issues as an important step in grappling with them and their equally complicated answers.
“The ethical questions seem endlessly debatable, but it is important to underline these complexities and to show, precisely, that they are not unproblematic,” Solomon said.
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