Scholarship
Schor was one of the early proponents of French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory in American literary studies. She wrote about canonical authors such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, re-examining their work through the double lens of the male-authored theoretical discourse of Jacques Derrida (whom she knew personally), Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and that of French feminist theoreticians such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.
Schor was the founding co-editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, in 1989, a critical forum where the problematics of difference is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social.
An area of Schor’s expertise was the work of the feminist psychoanalytic theorist Luce Irigaray. With Carolyn Burke and Margaret Whitford, she edited Engaging with Irigaray, which included essays by Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Weed, and Judith Butler. With differences co-founder and co-editor Weed, Schor edited a number of differences books, including The Essential Difference in 1994 and Queer Theory Meets Feminism in 1997.
Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine is considered one of Schor’s most influential books. In this classic 1987 work of aesthetic and feminist theory, available in a 2006 paperback edition, Schor provided new ways of thinking about the gendering of details and ornament in literature, art, and architecture.
In other writings she developed the concept of female fetishism, in her many writings on the work of George Sand; she examined the question of idealism, also in relation to Sand, and in her late writings and research revisited the concept of universalism in an era of identity politics and difference.
Read more about this topic: Naomi Schor
Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
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