Naomi Schor papers (Ms.2006.02)

Biographical note

Naomi Schor, one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory and a pioneer feminist theorist of her generation, held appointments at such universities as Columbia, Brown, Duke, Harvard, and Yale. From 1985 until 1989, she held the Nancy Duke Lewis Chair at Brown University; at the time of her death at the age of 58, Schor was the Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University, where she had also earned her doctorate.

One of the leading interpreters of the writings of such French theorists and philosophers as Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, Schor specialized in nineteenth-century French literature, writing extensively on Zola, Balzac, Sand, and Flaubert. A founding coeditor of "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies", Schor was committed to challenging conventional understanding and to questioning not only what we take for knowledge but how knowledges are produced.

Born in New York City on October 10, 1943, Naomi Schor was the daughter of the renowned painter, goldsmith, and artist of Judaica, Ilya Schor. Her mother, Resia Schor, was also an artist. Both parents had fled from Poland to Paris to escape the Nazis, eventually reaching New York by way of Lisbon in December 1941.

Brought up in a home filled with art, music, and literature, Schor was educated at the Lycée Français in New York City and went on to earn her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in 1963. Her family was part of a community of artists and intellectuals, and the family spoke French at home.

The author of five books and more the fifty articles, as well as the editor of several collections, her monographs include Zola's Crowds (1978), Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (1985), George Sand and Idealism (1993), and Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995). Schor is, however, perhaps most known for her 1987 book Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, which brought meticulous attention to the gendering of the detail, long associated with the ornamental, the effeminate, the decadent, and the mundane. Her analyses drew from Renaissance painting, Greta Garbo, Kafka, Freud, Lukács, Dali, Eisenstein, and Duane Hanson, among others. The book, reprinted in 2006, continues to influence scholars across disciplinary lines, from French studies to art historians and visual artists.

She died suddenly December 2, 2001 at the age of 58 in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time of her death in 2001, she was working on a book project on universalism.