It's rare to read a book that isn't comparable to any others that I've read. Sebald covers every topic imaginable as we walk with him through Suffolk -- from Darwinism, to Borges, to Leopold's Congo, to herring fishing. This all occurs from taking small steps through Sufflok, and by noticing the details of everything that surrounds him, and by showing how everything is connected. I really think that Sebald has created a new kind of philosophy with this book; it's part existentialism, part metaphysical, and totally unique. Rings of Saturn review at Amazon.
In her book "Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine" (Methuen, 1987), she argued that men, in taking the universal view, have historically tended to de-emphasize the importance of details. She suggested that details were considered ornamental or mundane, and as such, were deemed women's stuff. But at the same time, theorists like Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher whom Dr. Schor knew and interpreted in her writings, were coming to consider traditional visions of universal truth irrelevant. To them, the truth was in the meaning of details. "Does the triumph of detail signify a triumph of the feminine with which it has long been linked?" she asked. "Or has the detail achieved new prestige by being taken over by the masculine, triumphing at the very moment when it ceases to be associated with the feminine?" She relentlessly challenged conventional understanding in her teaching and writing as well as in a feminist journal she helped found in 1989 at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Even the name of the journal "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies" reflects her idiosyncratic outlook. She suggested putting the "s" in italics to make people think. (The lowercase "d" was chosen by graphic designers.) "She had this amazing way of making the familiar look unfamiliar," said Elizabeth Weed, the other founding editor. Dr. Schor was born on Oct. 10, 1943, in Manhattan. Her father, Ilya, was a painter, goldsmith and artist of Judaica. Her mother, Resia, was also an artist. They had fled from Poland to Paris to escape the Nazis, eventually reaching New York, by way of Lisbon, on Dec. 3, 1941. From nyt piece on the passing of naomi shor.Devils in the detail.