07 January 2016

Review: The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture by Susan R. Bordo

Hardcover, 145 pages
Published 1987
Borrowed from the library
Read December 2012
The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture
by Susan R. Bordo

Susan Bordo's essay "Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body" is a mainstay of the composition program I teach in, as well as my own teaching, so I was excited to finally get a chance to read something else by her-- especially about my favorite of subjects, science. But this slim book was less than I expected: more focused on Descartes specifically, and one particular work by him at that, and drawing a lot (as I recall, it's been a while) on the tools of psychoanalytic criticism, which I don't find particularly interesting. Still, Bordo's keen insight still digs out some good nuggets, especially (as you might expect) about the gender dynamics in play in our conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity, and how what we think of as just being is was of course constructed by culture.

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