The Fetish: Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

ISBN-13: 9781501312359 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 200 str.

Massimo Fusillo

Opis

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book identifies a series of patterns that combine historical perspective with a theoretical underpinning. These include patterns of seduction, the object as a site for memorial, and the trope of the animation of the inanimate. If all these patterns are dominated by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights on the other hand a more latent and opposite component: the fascination with the alterity of matter, which awakes thorny gnoseological questions, variously developed by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. Finally, the last turning point is postmodernism, focusing on the icons of mass media, ranging from DeLillo's epic, maximalist fresco Underworld, to Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs and Palahniuk's representations of porn objects, from pop art to commodity sculpture.