Fetish

Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

Inbunden, Engelska, 2017

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Beskrivning

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert’s style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophüls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo’s analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons—from DeLillo’s maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith’s reflections on autographs to Palahniuk’s porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2017-09-21
Mått:152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt:435 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:200
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN:9781501312359

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Mer om författaren

Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, where he is Director of the Ph.D. Program in Literary and Cultural Studies and Vice Chancellor for Cultural Affairs. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA, and Invited Professor at the PhD Program in Comparative Literature of Paris 3. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA/AICL).

Recensioner i media

Brilliantly debunking received understandings of fetishism as an individual perversion or as a consumerist obsession, and effectively severing it from its ideological and moralistic anchorings, Massimo Fusillo theorises the fetishist gaze as an inexhaustible site of creative production and compares it to the processes of literary composition and artistic creation. Richly interdisciplinary and convincingly argued, using philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, anthropology, and feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory as critical frameworks, Fusillo draws examples across a wide variety of genres—literature, film, the visual arts, photography, popular culture, and performance—to demonstrate the ways in which fetishism and artistic creativity project passions, impulses, and memories on to everyday objects and produce alternative worlds. Original and highly innovative in content and style, the book’s relational approach to the fetish challenges allegiances to hierarchal knowledge and absolute identities, compelling a radical rethinking of our critical paradigms for the comparative study of literature and culture.

Innehållsförteckning

Preface: Creativity Is In the DetailsIntroduction: Object and Fetish: Theory, Intersection, Vision1. The Object of Seduction2. The Memorial Object: Between Wound and Catharsis3. The Magic Object: Animating the Inanimate4. Creating Worlds: The Mythopoetic Power of Objects5. Theatricalizing the Fetish-Object6. The Alterity of Matter7. The Object-IconBibliographyIndex