16 December 2001
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/obituaries/16SCHO.html
New York Times, December 16, 2001
Naomi Schor, a literary critic and theorist who combined psychoanalytic theory,
avant-garde philosophy and feminism to come up with quirky, often startling
insights into 19th-century French authors including Flaubert and Zola, died
on Dec. 2 at a New Haven hospital. She was 58 and lived in Hamden, Conn.
The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said her sister, Mira Schor.
Dr. Schor, the Benjamin F. Barge professor of French at Yale University,
brought French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory to French studies
in the United States, said Joan W. Scott, a professor of social science at
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
As one example of how this worked, she cited Dr. Schor's essay on fetishism
in the novels of George Sand, the cigar-smoking, cross- dressing novelist
who was the most widely celebrated female writer in France in the 1800's.
Dr. Schor found many ways that women in Sand's novels used fetishes, which
are usually considered a male preoccupation.
Dr. Schor also used unconventional approaches to discover atypical ways in
which the female body was represented in 19th-century French literature.
She argued that when Zola depicted the uncontrollable passions of crowds,
he used feminine means to express them.
Dr. Schor, who once wrote that she hoped to become "an intellectual bad girl,"
delighted in controversy. For example, in an article published last January
in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, she explored the notion of
male lesbianism, suggesting ways that Flaubert and other male authors seemed
to speak from a lesbian perspective.
In her book "Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine" (Methuen, 1987),
she argued that men, in taking the universal view, have historically tended
to de-emphasize the importance of details. She suggested that details were
considered ornamental or mundane, and as such, were deemed women's stuff.
But at the same time, theorists like Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher
whom Dr. Schor knew and interpreted in her writings, were coming to consider
traditional visions of universal truth irrelevant. To them, the truth was
in the meaning of details.
"Does the triumph of detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which
it has long been linked?" she asked. "Or has the detail achieved new prestige
by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when
it ceases to be associated with the feminine?"
She relentlessly challenged conventional understanding in her teaching and
writing as well as in a feminist journal she helped found in 1989 at the
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Even
the name of the journal — "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies" — reflects her idiosyncratic outlook. She suggested putting
the "s" in italics to make people think. (The lowercase "d" was chosen by
graphic designers.)
"She had this amazing way of making the familiar look unfamiliar," said Elizabeth
Weed, the other founding editor.
Dr. Schor was born on Oct. 10, 1943, in Manhattan. Her father, Ilya, was
a painter, goldsmith and artist of Judaica. Her mother, Resia, was also an
artist. They had fled from Poland to Paris to escape the Nazis, eventually
reaching New York, by way of Lisbon, on Dec. 3, 1941.
Her parents moved in a cosmopolitan circle of intellectuals and artists in
New York and spoke French, which was Dr. Schor's first language, at home.
Her public school teachers told her parents they doubted she would be able
to read, a problem solved when her parents bought her eyeglasses. They placed
her at the Lycée Français, where she remained through high
school.
Her sister said she devoured books and seldom went outdoors, leading neighbors
to think that the family had only one daughter. Already, she was aspiring
to lead a life of the mind. She wrote in an essay for The Los Angeles Times
in 1986 that this was not easy.
"For a girl it was an act of courage, not to say folly," she wrote. "It meant
certain unpopularity, even ostracism."
She graduated from Barnard College, where she majored in English, and received
her doctorate in French at Yale, where her first published articles were
written not only on French but also in French.
"I knew that my advantage really lay in French," she said. "When I went to
graduate school, it never occurred to me to do anything else."
Her literary and philosophical interests always seemed to be slightly ahead
of the newest academic currents, said Sharon Marcus, an English professor
at the University of California at Berkeley and a former student of Dr. Schor's.
"She was always interested in charting the territory that was just a little
more complicated than what everyone else was saying," Dr. Marcus said.
Her 5 books and more than 50 academic articles made her the sort of star
that prestigious universities compete to recruit. She taught at Brown, Duke
and Harvard.
In 1999 she joined the faculty at Yale, where her husband, Howard Bloch,
teaches in the French department. In addition to her husband and sister,
she is survived by her mother, who lives in Manhattan.
Dr. Schor once said she had love affairs with intellectual "ism's," including
fetishism, realism, idealism, universalism and feminism, her favorite.
She organized a symposium titled "Man and Beast," which was to have taken
place the weekend after she died. Scholars from many disciplines had planned
to examine similarities and differences between humans and animals, perhaps
under the rubric of speciesism.