From Detail to Periphery: All French Literature Is Francophone

Abstract

Naomi Schor, our close friend and colleague for whom we grieve in this collection of essays that Christopher Miller and Farid Laroussi have assembled, has shown us that the beauty and force of literature are felt when it is treated in all of its detail. Her studies capture things minuscule that she makes scintillate as she arrives at conclusions of universal proportion. Focusing on Zola, Sand, Balzac, or Chateaubriand, she locates crucial points where language and image or where speech and things conflate, explode, and radiate luminous energies. Her work has been-and will continue to be-a model of reading that we can strive to follow. In her teaching, too, Naomi seized upon turns of expression where meaning suddenly becomes strange, where it opens onto new spaces, and wherever, in the very least, it invites close and extensive scrutiny. For all of us she has been a champion of the alienating powers of literature. She has shown us that her literary heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century France were forever transfiguring their verbal matter into things seen, into choses vues that had often been overlooked by champions of literary positivism. Conversely, in her studies of art and artists-on the walls of her imaginary museum hung paintings by Delacroix, Gericault, and Millet, and on the floors stood the sculptures of Duane Hanson adjacent to those of Rodin-her modern masters encrusted their pigment, stone, or acrylics with verbal matter. Shards of language turned these things into objets lus, into forms where writing and images turned back and forth into one and the other. She continually turned words into elegant shapes that were other than what they