Naomi Schor

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 Émile 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 Feminism Meets Queer Theory 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.

Personal life

At the time of her death she was married to R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French and Chair of the Humanities Program at Yale. A first marriage, to Breton poet Paol Keineg, ended in divorce.

Colloquia and conferences

• "Romancing the Dead," Feminist Theory, Brown University September 1995; Keynote address, 21st Annual Meeting, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, October 1995; Longest Lecture, Ole Miss, November 1995; Zaharoff Lecture, Oxford University, 1996.
• "Il et Elle: Croisset et Nohant," Colloque de Nohant, Nohant, Septembre 1991.
• "George Sand and Feminism: Lettres à Marcie," Feminist Theory: An International Debate, University of Glasgow, July 1991.
• "Triste Amérique: Atala and the Post-Revolutionary Construction of Woman," Keynote Address, "Woman and Representation," Rhode Island College. April 1989.

"Woman and the French Revolution," UCLA, October 1989; Danziger Memorial Lecture. The University of Chicago, May 1990.

• "Roland Barthes: Necrologies," 2nd International Conference on Translation, Barnard College, November 1984.
• "Roland Barthes' Aesthetics," Dimensions of Narrative Conference, Brown University, November 1983.
• "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand," Eight Annual Nineteenth Century Colloquium in French Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst. October 1982; Colloquium on "Women and Signs," July, 1983, Urbino, Italy; Berkshire Conference, June 1984.
• "Details and Realism: La Curé de Tours," "Synopsis IV," the Porter Institute for Semiotics and Poetics, Tel-Aviv University, May 1982.
• "Salammbo enchainée: Femme et Ville dans Salammbo," Journé d'etudes: Flaubert, La Femme, la Ville. Centennaire de la mort de Gustave Flaubert, Célébrations Nationales, Paris, France, November 1980; Flaubert Colloquium, University of Bielefeld, West Germany, May 1981.
• "Le Statut du détail chez Freud," colloque sur le fragment, Université de Montréal, March 1978; Brown University, March 1978.
• "Le délire d'interprétation: naturalisme et paranoia", Colloquium on Naturalism, Cerisy, France, July 1976.