Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Introductory Note"We live in an age when the detail enjoys a rare prominence" is the opening sentence of Naomi Schor's 1987 book, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine.Like so much of Schor's work, the comment, in its description of the then current scene, seemed both utterly right and strikingly new.The detail was there for all to see, driving the rhetorical energy of poststructuralist thinking (indeed, Michel Foucault had called for a "History of the Detail," Schor points out, "which would chart its passage from a theological categor y in the Age of Classicism to its present role as an instrument of both knowledge and power" [3]), but the detail Schor brought forth was at the same time unfamiliar.For one thing, her detail had a history.The textual detail so crucial to poststructuralist theor y was, she argued, inseparable from the abjected particular of Western idealism: "For as any historian of ideas knows, the detail until very recently has been viewed in the West with suspicion if not downright hostility" (3).Moreover, Schor goes on, the detail, bounded on either side by the ornamenta l and the prosaic, was historically gendered as feminine.Given that histor y, what to make of poststructuralism's detail, the "desublimated detail" of Foucault or Derrida or Barthes?"Viewed in a historical perspective, the
Source: differences
Author: The Editors,
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4237678731