Miniature 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.
- Table of Contents
- Preface/Hyperbole
- Prologue
- 1. On Description And The Book
- Still Life
- The Sadness Without an Object
- Interior Decorations
- Space of Language
- 2. The Miniature
- Micrographia
- Tableau: The Miniature Described
- The Secret Life of Things
- The Dollhouse
- Miniature Time
- 3. The Gigantic
- Skywriting: Exteriority and Nature
- Exteriority: The City
- The Gigantic Described
- The Lie: Gigantism in Language
- 4. The Imaginary Body
- The Grotesque Body
- The Body Made Miniature
- The Tom Thumb Wedding
- Reading the Body
- 5. Objects Of Desire
- Part I. The Souvenir
- The Selfish
- Distance and Intimacy
- Separation and Restoration
- Part II. The Collection, Paradise of Consumption
- Context Destroyed
- Inside and Outside
- Metaconsumption: The Female Impersonator
- Conclusion/Litotes
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
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