Former Harvard French Professor Dies

Naomi Schor, a leading scholar who brought feminist and psychoanalytic criticism to the study of French literature, died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage last Sunday. She was 58.

Schor taught at Harvard from 1996 to 1999 as Smith professor of French language and literature before she left for Yale University to become acting director of graduate studies in the university’s French department.

Schor focused on the works of Flaubert, Zola and other 19th-century French writers. But her academic work was “eclectic” by her own description; Schor’s intellectual interests ranged from Salvador Dali to George Sand.

“She was an extraordinarily important force in the dissemination of the ideas of literary criticism and feminism,” said Brad S. Epps, professor of Romance languages and literature at Harvard. “She was an incredibly gifted reader of text.”

Epps knew Schor for 15 years, first as a student of Schor’s at Brown, and then as a colleague at Harvard.

“She was a brilliant, beautiful person with a wonderfully wry sense of humor, and an extraordinary sense of criticism and self-criticism,” he said.

Schor’s interest in French literature began early. Her parents, both artists and refugees from Nazi persecution in Poland, came to the United States in 1941. Schor was born two years later in New York City, where her parents enrolled her in a French private school.

She majored in English at Barnard and received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1969. She taught at Yale, Brown and a number of other schools before coming to Harvard in 1996.

At Harvard, Schor sat on the Faculty committees on women’s studies and social studies. She also advised graduate students and undergraduate thesis writers.

“She was very dynamic, extremely perceptive, and extremely dedicated,” said Chimene I. Keitner ’96, whom Schor advised on her Hoopes Prize-winning thesis in History and Literature.

“As a ’70s feminist—somewhere between the pioneer figures and the second generation—I was deeply involved in rethinking the French canon,” Schor told the Harvard Gazette shortly after she came to the University in 1996.

In Schor’s influential 1987 book Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction “she explored feminism and psychoanalysis in the 19th-century realist novel. She focused on how male authors portray femininity and feminine difference,” said Maurice A. Samuels, who was a graduate student of Schor’s.

Schor is survived by her husband Howard Bloch, professor of French at Yale, her mother Resia, and her sister, Mira.