On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the by Susan Stewart

By Susan Stewart

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall stories, and items of tourism and nostalgia: this various workforce of cultural kinds is the topic of On Longing, a desirable research of the ways that daily gadgets are narrated to animate or observe sure models of the realm. initially released in 1984 (Johns Hopkins collage Press), and now to be had in paperback for the 1st time, this hugely unique booklet attracts on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist feedback. Addressing the kin of language to adventure, the physique to scale, and narratives to things, Susan Stewart appears to be like on the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and on the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of elements of the outside. within the ultimate a part of her essay Stewart examines the ways that the "souvenir" and the "collection" are items mediating event in time and space.

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36 Within this semiotic universe, the material object is transformed completely to the realm of exchange value. There is no point to the detail in bourgeois realism aside from its function within the world of signs, its message that it is the trace of the real. The ornament does not dress the object; it defines the object. We find an analogy to our position in Guy Debord's critique of the spectacle forms of what might be termed the semiotics of late capitalism. "It [spectacle] is not a supplement to the real world, its added decoration.

Memory, at once impoverished and enriched, presents itself as a device for measurement, the "ruler" of narrative. Thus near-sightedness and far-sightedness emerge as metaphors for understanding, and they will be of increasing importance as this essay proceeds. Interior Decorations Nostalgia's longing for absolute presence in the face of a gap between signifier and signified reminds us that narrative is a signifying phenomenon made up of another signifying phenomenon: language "means" before narrative takes it up.

Our terror of the unmarked grave is a terror of the insignificance of a world without writing. The metaphor of the unmarked grave is one which joins the mute and the ambivalent; without the mark there is no boundary, no point at which to begin the repetition. Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature: the lovers' names carved in bark, the slogans on the bridge, and the strangely uniform and idiosyncratic hand that has tattooed the subways. Writing serves to caption the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize.

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