Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular

by Naomi Schor

Bad objects are a contrarian’s delight. In this volume, leading French feminist theorist and literary critic Naomi Schor revisits some of feminist theory’s most widely discredited objects, essentialism and universalism, with surprising results. Bilingual and bicultural, she reveals the national character of contemporary theories that are usually received as beyond borders, while making a strong argument for feminist theory’s specific claims to universalism.
Written in a distinctive personal and self-reflective mode, this collection offers new unpublished work and brings together for the first time some of Schor’s best-known and most influential essays. These engagements with Anglo-American feminist theory, Freud and psychoanalytic theory, French poststructuralists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Irigaray, and French fiction by or about women—especially of the nineteenth century—also address such issues as bilingual identity, professional controversies, female fetishism, and literature and gender. Schor then concludes with a provocative meditation on the future of feminism.
As they read Bad Objects , Anglo-American theoreticians who have been mainly preoccupied with French feminism will find themselves drawn into French literary and cultural history, while French literary critics and historians will be placed in contact with feminist debate.

Genres: Feminism, Gender Studies

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 1995

About the author

Literary critic and theorist specialized in French literature and feminist critical theory.

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.

Reviews

[Annie]

I found this book on the street. Don't know much about psychoanalysis-marries-feminism but I know she writes a lot about Irigiray whom people-I-know (*cough*Ian Maley*cough*) despise, SO. I'll let y'all know how it goes!