Fetish

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).

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.

• 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