The Fetish: Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

by Massimo Fusillo

Overview

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 Ophüls), 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501312373
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/21/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	509 KB

About the Author

Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, where he is Director of the Ph.D. Program in Literary and Cultural Studies and Vice Chancellor for Cultural Affairs. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA, and Invited Professor at the PhD Program in Comparative Literature of Paris 3. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA/AICL).
Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, where he is Director of the Ph.D. Program in Literary and Cultural Studies and Vice Chancellor for Cultural Affairs. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA, and Invited Professor at the PhD Program in Comparative Literature of Paris 3. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA/AICL). He has written widely on thematic criticism, modern reception of ancient tragedy, theory and history of novel, queer theory. His books have been translated into several languages.

Massimo Fusillo is Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, where he is also Coordinator of the PhD Program on Literary Genres. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Comparative Literature (ICLA). His books include Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le Baccanti nel Novecento (2006), Pasolini. Mito e cinema (2nd edn, 2007), Estetica della letteratura (2009) and Feticci. Letteratura cinema arti visive (2012).

Table of Contents

Preface: Creativity Is In the Details
Introduction: Object and Fetish: Theory, Intersection, Vision
1. The Object of Seduction
2. The Memorial Object: Between Wound and Catharsis
3. The Magic Object: Animating the Inanimate
4. Creating Worlds: The Mythopoetic Power of Objects
5. Theatricalizing the Fetish-Object
6. The Alterity of Matter
7. The Object-Icon
Bibliography
Index