Reading in Detail

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 ofPower"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

• 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