Feminizing the Fetish

Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is coeditor of Fetishism as Cultural Discourse: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-Of-The-Century France, also from Cornell University Press, and the author of Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects.

In light of recent critical debate, one might say that of the perversions fetishism is the most widely shared. Its subjects and objects are ubiquitous, and include male and female writers, patients, and literary characters and critics. The publication of such an in-depth analysis of fetishism in turn-of-the-century French literature seemed necessary in such a climate, and Apter's insightful book fulfills the perverse reader's expectations.- Marie Lathers (French Review)