Naomi Schor

Naomi Schor (October 10, 1943 in New York City – December 2, 2001 in New Haven, Connecticut ) was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor. At the time of her birth, Naomi Schor's Polish-born parents Ilya and Resia Schor were artists who had recently immigrated to the US as refugees from war-torn Europe. Ilya Schor was a painter, jeweler and artist of Judaica, and Resia Schor was a painter who later worked in silver and gold and mixed media on sculptural jewelry and Judaica. The Schors lived among a polyglot community of émigrés, among them musicians, intellectuals, and artists. Naomi Schor’s first language was French, and she went to the Lycée Français de New York where she received her Baccalauréat in 1961, the same year, sadly, that her father died. Schor received her B.A. in English Literature from Barnard College then received her PhD in French Literature from Yale. There Schor occasionally wrote her scholarly essays in French. Schor was one of the early proponents of French psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory in American literary studies. She wrote about canonical authors such as Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, re-examining their work through the double lens of the male-authored theoretical discourse of Jacques Derrida (whom she knew personally), Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and that of French feminist theoreticians such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Schor was the founding co-editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, in 1989, a critical forum where the problematics of difference is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social. An area of Schor’s expertise was the work of the feminist psychoanalytic theorist Luce Irigaray.