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The fetish : literature, cinema, visual art / Massimo Fusillo ; translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson.
Van Pelt Library PN56.F47 F8713 2017
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Fusillo, Massimo, 1959- author.
- Standardized Title:
- Feticci. English
- Language:
- English
- Italian
- Subjects (All):
- Fetishism in literature.
- Fetishism in art.
- Physical Description:
- xii, 183 pages ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, [2017]
- Summary:
- Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophuls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.
- Contents:
- 1 The Object of Seduction 19
- Narration and description: ekphrasis 19
- Apollonius of Rhodes 22
- The medieval pastorela 26
- Carlo Goldoni 27
- Oscar Wilde 30
- Max Ophüls 30
- 2 The Memorial Object: Between Wound and Catharsis 33
- The great era of the European novel (Goethe, Dickens) 33
- The mental journey of Des Esseintes 41
- The postcolonial epic (Salman Rushdie) 42
- Pamuk's Museum 46
- Installations (Louise Bourgeois, Christian Boltanski) 53
- Photography and narrative art (Sophie Calle) 58
- 3 The Magical Object: Animating the Inanimate 61
- The manikin (Achim von Arnim) 61
- The portrait (Wilde-Lewin) 66
- Odradek (Kafka) 72
- Idols (Gauguin and Picasso) 74
- Video objects (Tony Oursler) 78
- 4 Creating Worlds: The Mythopoetic Force of Objects 81
- Gustave Flaubert 81
- Elia Kazan 88
- 5 Theatricalizing the Fetish-Object 95
- Aestheticism (Huysmans) 95
- Naturalism (Zola) 103
- James Joyce 107
- Camp (Aubrey Beardsley, Joseph von Sternberg) 109
- Installations (Kienholz, Kabakov) 116
- The rituality of sadomasochism 120
- O Fantasma 123
- 6 The Alterity of Matter 125
- Modernism (Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, Mann) 125
- Pathological collectionism (Franzosini, Szabó, Doctorow) 139
- Eugenio Montale 142
- The nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet) 144
- Georges Perec 148
- Marco Ferreri 150
- Arte povera 152
- 7 The Object-Icon 155
- Maximalism (Don DeLillo) 155
- The autograph (Zadie Smith) 160
- The porno object (Chuck Palahniuk) 162
- Pop art 163
- Commodity sculpture 164
- Pig Island 165.
- Notes:
- Translated from the Italian.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9781501312359
- 1501312359
- OCLC:
- 946903487
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