Details, Clues, Fetishes (PhD)

For a long time, detail was relegated to the margins of research, viewed as an ornamental phenomenon associated with the everyday world of women and contrasted with the nobility of the sublime. Even today, an echo of this devaluation can be perceived in common language, which attributes little significance to it. Beginning with Naomi Schor’s seminal essay (1987), detail has instead been placed at the center of aesthetics, philosophy, iconology, literary theory, feminist and queer criticism, visual studies, and art history. Its practice radiates across all the arts and all media, giving rise to an authentic poetics, which will be the focus of the course, and which will be nourished by continuous engagement with parallel concepts such as the “indice” (clue) highlighted by Carlo Ginzburg and the “fetish” (but also “trace,” “ornament,” and “particular”). Fundamental critical concepts such as realism, the fantastic, mannerism, and camp are linked to the detail. We begin with a lengthy theoretical and methodological introduction, and then move on to the analysis of several ancient and modern texts, with numerous forays into other media and genres such as painting, theater, cinema, TV series, installations, and performances. The starting point will be a brief investigation of ekphrasis as the first genre based on description and visual detail (Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Achilles Tatius, Philostratus, Giambattista Marino, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Daniele Del Del Giudice, Manuel Puig), and then to analyze the great works that make extensive use of detail—often as an emotional catalyst, and thus heavily imbued with fetishism: Flaubert’s *Madame Bovary*, James’s *Daisy Miller*, Chekhov’s *The Cherry Orchard* (especially in Stanislavski’s legendary production), Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” Sophie Calle’s “True Stories”; and also: a masterpiece of musical theater such as Giacomo Puccini’s “La Tosca,” and great films such as von Sternberg’s “Scarlett Empress,” Kazan’s “The Last Tycoon,” and Antonioni’s “L’eclisse.”