Synopses & Reviews
This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ?material turn? in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organisation of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organisation of colonial forms of governance.
A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns ?from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonised in French colonial practices to the part played my the relations between museums and expeditions in the organisation of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ?cultural turn?.
The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.
Review
and#8220;Babette Band#228;rbel Tischlederand#8217;s readings of texts are no less fresh and forceful than the topics those texts bring into focus: object agency, obsolescence, patina, and (magnificently) the recalcitrance of things. The book is a timely and important contribution to American studies and to object studies both.and#8221;
Synopsis
Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literatureand#151;from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzenand#151;The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.
About the Author
Babette Bärbel Tischleder is professor of North American studies at Göttingen University, Germany. She is author of Body Trouble: Entkörperlichung, Whiteness und das amerikanische Gegenwartskino.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Lively Objects-Scenes of Animation and the American Literary Imagination
1. Sentimental Patina: The Ideal Ecology of Objects in Harriet Beecher Stoweand#8217;s House and Home Papers
and#8220;The Ravages of a Carpetand#8221;: Novelty vs. Tradition
The Culture of Things: Morality vs. Anthropology
Sentimental Possession: An Anthropological Perspective
A Domestic World of Animate Things: Stoweand#8217;s Culture of Comfort
The Moral Lesson of Furniture: Against a World Robbed of Living Things
Criticism and Prospects
Sentimental Patina
2. Sacred Objects, Freakish Ornaments: Domestic Environmentalism in the Gilded Age
A Home Hallowed by Religion: Stoweand#8217;s Parlor Piety
Horace Bushnell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Domestic Environmentalism
Christian Commodities
Charlotte Perkins Gilmanand#8217;s Disenchanted Vision of Home
Expressive Things, Impressionable Children
Gothic Things and Literary Houses
Yellow Environments, Vicious Storytelling
Nerves and Decoration
Home Influence and Domestic Mythology in the Post-Darwinian Age
Mental Myopia: From the Sanctuary to the Coop
3. The Scent of Things: Edith Wharton, Modern Subjectivity, and the Anatomy of Taste
The Self in/as a Cluster of Things: Metonymy and Modern Subjectivity
The Flower in the Hothouse: Lilyand#8217;s Sensuous Nobility
The Scent of Things: Object Lessons and the Kinship of Taste
The Smell of Things
A Last Touch of Intimacy
4. Object Trouble: Thing Theory, Vladimir Nabokovand#8217;s Pnin, and the American Tradition of Recalcitrant Matter
Thing Theory, Philosophy, Satire: From Existentialism to Resistentialism
and#8220;Look at the Darned Thingand#8221;: Buster Keatonand#8217;s One Week
Recalcitrance by Human Design
Pnin: The American Scene in the 1950and#8217;s
Pninizing
A Strange World of American Things
Matters of Affection
Conclusion: Recalcatrince Revisited
5. The Thingness of the Text: Jonathan Franzenand#8217;s Rhopography of Obsolescence
The Matter of Obsolescence
Realism and Rhopography
The Blue Chair and the Tangibility of Things
The Matter of Entropy
Cultural Wars and the Empire of the Ephemeral
Existential Obsolescence
Unloved Objects
Negative Authenticity-Abject Realness
The Cluttered Text
Lists as Literary Still Lifes
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Things
Bibliography
Primary Works
Art, Photography, Film
Criticism and Theory
Index