1st Edition

Reading in Detail Aesthetics and the Feminine

By Naomi Schor Copyright 2007
280 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

280 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

280 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Who cares about details? As Naomi Schor explains in her highly influential book, we do-but it has not always been so. The interest in detail--in art, in literature, and as an aesthetic category--is the product of the decline of classicism and the rise of realism. But the story of the detail is as political as it is aesthetic. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism,... Read more

Note on Permissions  List of Figures  Foreword, Ellen Rooney Acknowledgments  Introduction  Part 1: Archaeology  1. Gender: In the Academy  2. Sublimation: Hegel’s Aesthetics  3. Decadence: Wey, Loos, Lukács 4. Displacement: The Case of Sigmund Freud  5. Desublimation: Roland Barthes’s Aesthetics  Part 2: Readings  6. Dali’s Freud  7. The Delusion of Interpretation: The Conquest of Plassans  8. Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction  9. Duane Hanson: Truth in Sculpture  10. Details and Realism: The Curé de Tours  Notes  Bibliography  Index

Biography

Naomi Schor (1943-2001) was the Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. A noted scholar of French literature and critical theory, her other books include Zola's Crowds, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction, George Sand and Idealism and Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular.

"A major statement of feminist aesthetics that will change our sense of what and how details mean." -- Woman of Power
"Extremely rich and exciting." -- Novel
"A brilliant reader of nineteenth century French literature, Naomi Schor uses her familiarity with the formal issues in realist fiction as a vantage point from which to view the last two centuries of aesthetic theory. Reading in Detail makes it clear that we are still fighting the realist battle with classicism, that neo-classical attitudes continue to recur in various guises and furthermore bear a complicated and interesting relation to ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity." -- Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee