A Sense of Things

by Brown, Bill

• ISBN13: 9780226076287
• ISBN10: 0226076288
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In May 1906, theAtlantic Monthlycommented that Americans live not merely in an age of things, but under the tyranny of them, and that in our relentless effort to sell, purchase, and accumulate things, we do not possess them as much as they possess us. For Bill Brown, the tale of that possession is something stranger than the history of a culture of consumption. It is the story of Americans using things to think about themselves. Brown's captivating new study explores the roots of modern America's fascination with things and the problem that objects posed for American literature at the turn of the century. This was an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things suddenly came to define a national culture. Brown shows how crucial novels of the time made things not a solution to problems, but problems in their own right. Writers such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears, and to shape our wildest dreams. Offering a remarkably new way to think about materialism,A Sense of Thingswill be essential reading for anyone interested in American literature and culture.

Author Biography

Bill Brown is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, editor of Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns, and coeditor of Critical Inquiry.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction the Idea of Things and the Ideas in Them	1	(20)
The Tyranny of Things	21	(30)
Fetishisms	25	(5)
Object Lessons	30	(6)
A Trivial Thing	36	(7)
Democratic Objects	43	(8)
The Nature of Things	51	(30)
Iteration	54	(5)
Creatures of Habit	59	(4)
Possession	63	(5)
The Miracle of History	68	(6)
Misuse Value	74	(7)
Regional Artifacts	81	(55)
Natural Histories	84	(8)
Life-Groups and the Cultural Thing	92	(7)
Material History	99	(14)
``A Kind of Fetichism''	113	(5)
Waste Matter	118	(6)
Modernist Archeology	124	(12)
The Decoration of Houses	136	(41)
Decor	142	(8)
The Novel Demeuble	150	(5)
Reification as Utopia	155	(7)
Things to Think With	162	(7)
Golden Bowls	169	(8)
Coda the Death and Life of Things: Modernity and Modernism	177	(12)
Notes	189	(48)
Index	237