On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the CollectionMiniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space. |
Contents
ON DESCRIPTION AND THE BOOK | 3 |
THE MINIATURE | 37 |
THE GIGANTIC | 70 |
THE IMAGINARY BODY | 104 |
OBJECTS OF DESIRE | 132 |
The Collection Paradise of Consumption | 151 |
The Female Impersonator | 166 |
Notes | 174 |
| 193 | |
| 205 | |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic animal antiquarian articulation authenticity Baudrillard becomes body Brobdingnag capacity carnival closure collection commodity consumer context of origin conventions culture depiction desire detail discourse display distance dollhouse Early Modern France earth art economy everyday exaggeration example exchange value exterior fairies fantastic Febold Feboldson fiction fictive freak function genres giants grotesque grotesque body Gulliver's Hence human Ibid ideological individual infinity interior inversion kitsch labor landscape language late capitalism literary lived experience Macrocosms and Microcosms marks material means metaphor metonymic microcosm micrographia minia miniature book mode of production moves multum in parvo narrative narrator nature nostalgia nostalgic notion object photographs physical picturesque present Raymond Roussel reader reading relation representation reproduction Roussel scale scene seen semiotic signified Similarly simultaneous social souvenir space speaks spectacle sublime symbolic tableau temporality Thumb wedding tion tourist tradition transcendence transformation ture viewer writing