Reading in Detail

Who cares about details? As Naomi Schor explains in her highly influential book, we do-but it has not always been so. The interest in detail--in art, in literature, and as an aesthetic category--is the product of the decline of classicism and the rise of realism.

But the story of the detail is as political as it is aesthetic. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism, the...