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HYLAND from the late Naomi Schor, then a professor at Columbia, later at Harvard and Yale. Schor, a gifted literary critic and teacher, would publish, in 1987, a book entitled Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. In it Schor writes: "My own love of the detail—and like all loves this love is shot through with ambivalence—is inextricably bound up with my Oedipus: my father, a goldsmith, was a master of ornamental detail, a Re- naissance artist in the age of high modernism and minimalism [...] In asserting the detail's claim to aesthetic dignity and epis- temological prestige, my motivation is then double: to endow with legitimacy my own brand of feminist hermeneutics, while giving value to my father's craft." Schor's seminar—in which we read Balzac's seminal epic of the telling detail, La peau de chagrin; Edgar Wind's Art and Anarchy, Freud's essay "Fetishism"—sparked in me a desire to give intellectual credibility to my own preoccupation with small objects, with what Dickens' character Wemmick, in Great Expectations, so charmingly called "portable property". Not all of us have the talent or means to master structure, but most of us harbor the inclination and ability to find, se- quester and cherish for ourselves some object which, like Mr. Meredith's cracked stone, is precious in our eyes. Such items possess—on a purely idiosyncratic level—the power of amulets, and as such, whatever their aesthetic or pecuniary value, deserve pride of place in every house. H Lisa Zeiger HYLAND