Other Things
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Other Things
From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo.
The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.
The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.
448 pages | 32 color plates, 30 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2015
Art: Art Criticism
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory
Philosophy: Aesthetics
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Overture (The Shield of Achilles)
One Things—in Theory
I The Matter of Modernism
Two The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf)
Three The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray)
Four Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick)
II Unhuman History
Five The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour)
Six Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles)
Seven Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen) 197
III Kitsch Kulchur
Eight How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story
(Shawn Wong)
Nine Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny
(Spike Lee)
Ten Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object
Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard)
Notes
Glossary
Index
Acknowledgments
Overture (The Shield of Achilles)
One Things—in Theory
I The Matter of Modernism
Two The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf)
Three The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray)
Four Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick)
II Unhuman History
Five The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour)
Six Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles)
Seven Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen) 197
III Kitsch Kulchur
Eight How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story
(Shawn Wong)
Nine Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny
(Spike Lee)
Ten Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object
Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard)
Notes
Glossary
Index
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