Things

by edited by Bill Brown

• ISBN13: 9780226076126
• ISBN10: 0226076121
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; what has been described as bourgeois longing. It is an invitation to think about the fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry--camp, collage, primitivism, consumer culture, museum culture, the aesthetic object, still life, "things as they are," Renaissance wonders, "the thing itself"--within the rubric of "things," not in an effort to foreclose the question of what sort of things these seem to be, but rather to suggest new questions about how objects produce subjects, about the phenomenology of the material everyday, about the secret life of things. Based on an award-winning special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, Things features eighteen thought-evoking essays by contributors including Bill Brown, Matthew L. Jones, Bruno Latour, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jessica Riskin, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Peter Schwenger, Charity Scribner, and Alan Trachtenberg.

Author Biography

Bill Brown is a professor of English at the University of Chicago, coeditor of Critical Inquiry and author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Thing Theory	1	(22)
Bill Brown
Shadows and Ephemera	23	(17)
Sidney R. Nagel
Descartes's Geometry as Spiritual Exercise	40	(32)
Matthew L. Jones
Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity	72	(27)
Daniel Tiffany
The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life	99	(36)
Jessica Riskin
Words and the Murder of the Thing	135	(16)
Peter Schwenger
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern	151	(23)
Bruno Latour
Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe	174	(19)
Peter Stallybrass
Ann Rosalind Jones
Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales	193	(34)
Jonathan Lamb
Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images	227	(18)
W.J. T. Mitchell
The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress	245	(59)
Christina Kiaer
The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum	304	(26)
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum	330	(16)
Charity Scribner
A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole	346	(16)
John Frow
Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She	362	(19)
Rey Chow
``Dying Is an Art, Like Everything Else''	381	(12)
Michael Taussig
``Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things''	393	(38)
Lesley Stern
Things on Film: Shadows and Voice in Wright Morris's Field of Vision	431
Alan Trachtenberg