The Fetish ─ Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

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.

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).