Who cares about details? As Naomi Schor explains in her highly influential book, we do-but it has not always been so. The interest in detail--in art, in literature, and as an aesthetic category--is the product of the decline of classicism and the rise of realism.
But the story of the detail is as political as it is aesthetic. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism, the invention of the quotidian, have all brought detail to the fore. In this classic work of aesthetic and feminist theory, now available in a new paperback edition, Schor provides ways of thinking...

Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how gender has been constructed and represented through language. This lively and thought-provoking Companion presents a range of approaches to the field. Some of the essays demonstrate feminist critical principles at work in analysing texts, while others take a step back to trace the development of a particular feminist literary method. The essays...

The question of what it means to be human is at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, humanity has been understood and defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. Recent scientific research and rigorous examinations of taxonomy, however, have raised controversial questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Man and Beast poses these central philosophical and scientific questions from a...

Twentieth-century ideologies, from liberalism to fascism, are rooted in humanism the faith in the sovereignty of human reason and potential that grew out of Renaissance thought and discovery. This special issue asks if it is true that all vestiges of humanism have been dismantled, or whether humanism has taken on new forms. Have new versions of historical analysis and cultural studies reanimated humanist themes? What is posthumanism? These essays examine relationships among structuralism, poststructuralism, and the subject; explore the challenge of anticolonialist critique to the coherence of...

Before her death in 2001, Naomi Schor was a leading scholar in feminist and critical theory and a founding coeditor of differences A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. This issue takes as its starting point Schor s book Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995), in which she discussed her attraction to the bad objects the academy had overlooked or ignored: universalism, essentialism, and feminism. Underpinning these bad objects was her mourning of the literary, a sense that her work and feminist theory more generally had departed from the textual readings in...