Bill Brown Research Articles

Roaming Pauses in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

ABSTRACT This article discusses a textual feature in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) that has hitherto been misunderstood by the reception, namely the spaced ellipses between several paragraphs which are considered by notable McCarthy scholars to signal particularly distinct pauses in the textual flow of the novel. The article demonstrates that this is a misperception with significant consequences for the interpretation of the story’s rhythm. Drawing on textual scholars such as Jerome McGann, Bill Brown, John Bryant, and John B. Thompson, the article finally discusses how neutral bibliographical codes occasionally express their own intentions that are in conflict with those of the author.

‘A random assembly of geometric forms’: Thing Theory in J. G. Ballard's and Ray Bradbury's short stories

AbstractThing Theory is a relatively new field of research, developed largely by Bill Brown on the basis of an already existing new materialist movement with roots reaching back to Martin Heidegger's interrogation of the ontology of things in ‘Das Ding’. Focusing on the interconnectedness of objects, their modes of being and irreducible ‘thingness’, as well as the agency objects are shown to exert when freed from the constraints of a subject‐centred perspective, this article presents a reading of three short stories by J. G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury which showcase how such issues are navigated in narrative form. Of particular interest for this article is the subject–object relationship, and the notion of ‘thingness’ as developed in Thing Theory in relation to the unique role accorded to the environment and inanimate objects in J. G. Ballard's and Ray Bradbury's selected works of fiction. It will be shown that a common theme connecting these works is the presence of a confrontation with the external world as it exists outside the definitions imposed on it by human subjects.

The “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves. This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.

“Such Common Objects” – The Politics of Everyday Life in G. K. Chesterton’s and Rose Macaulay’s Thing-Essays

In this article I argue that so-called light essays on apparently trivial items as they were published in periodicals of the early 20th century use the specificities of the essay genre to unveil dimensions of everyday life that are often taken for granted and thus overlooked. I will focus on two thing-essays – G. K. Chesterton’s “Lamp-Posts” (1920) and Rose Macaulay’s “Arm-Chair” (1935) – and argue that these essays help an emerging mass reader- and consumership to establish semantic coherence between themselves and the proliferating objects around them. Using Martin Heidegger’s and Bill Brown’s object-thing-distinction, I will also argue that these essays point to the relevance of everyday life and to the political issues that are sometimes manifest in everyday items. In particular, Chesterton’s and Macaulay’s thing-essays use the semantic flexibility of things to illustrate and defend their political, religious and intellectual views, touching on fields such as distributism, Catholicism and the so-called battle of the brows.

Snow globes and instant coffee: transparent commodities and the global infrastructures of late capitalism in contemporary fiction

ABSTRACT Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ famously calls for new forms of representation that can provide a better notion of the sublime world space of multinational capital. Jameson states that such aesthetic scale models are yet unrealised, but this essay argues that a number of contemporary novels, including Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Ben Lerner's 10:04 and works by Matias Faldbakken, Sally Rooney and William Gibson, present us with global figurations that are both more banal and more sublime than Jameson could have imagined. These novels all contain scenes where ordinary commodities are turned inside out in staggering leaps of scale, which constitute original figurations of the global infrastructures of late capitalism. Drawing on Bill Brown’s thing theory, Jennifer Wenzel’s notion of commodity biographies, and different theories of scale in the Anthropocene, I analyse different examples of this figure, which I term transparent commodities. In the concluding section, I show how these figurations prefigure the current global supply chain crisis, and I return to Jameson’s original demand for representations of the global totality, which I discuss in dialogue with my analyses as well as theories of planetarity by Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Networking Operatic Italy Francesca Vella

Enrico Petrella’s funeral march in Jone (1858) might at first seem indistinguishable from other nineteenth-century musical ephemera. Performed by an on-stage banda in Act IV of the once widely performed opera, the ‘lugubrious’ march—as it was named in the autograph score—accompanies the dramatic walk of a wrongly accused lover to his execution. However, the performance history of the march on opera stages—and Jone toured the world extensively in its first decades of performances—would fail to hear its growing presence on Italian city streets. Shortly after the opera’s La Scala premiere, the signature march became a standard in Italian wind-band repertory, where it found new life (and death) in secular funerals across the peninsula and during Holy Week processions in parts of southern Italy. The march grew to function in the Italian cultural consciousness as ‘an inward cipher of death and mourning’ (p. 67). Stories like this, which unspool how an operatic artefact became entangled in Italian culture, pepper Francesca Vella’s recent book, Networking Operatic Italy. In this enticing monograph, artists and operas travel the globe, technologies evolve and malfunction, and literary, archival, and musical sources are put in dialogue in innovative ways. One of the book’s core arguments is that ‘opera has always had a special networking capacity’ (p. 14) Vella ‘networks’—and use of the verb is deliberate—nineteenth-century Italian opera with its supporting media, wider infrastructure of mobility, and surrounding cultural discourses. Her concept of the network is, in part, indebted to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Bill Brown’s thing theory, as the objects central to her narrative are not passive components of opera’s history. Instead, objects, technologies, and ideas shape and condition opera through their affordances or limitations. Across five case studies of interconnected webs of people, ideas, and—of course—operas, Vella addresses transportation and communications media (railroads, wind-bands, voices, newspapers, and the telegraph) in the increasingly mobilized environment of Risorgimento and Liberal-era Italy. Her study of Italian opera journeys to various theatres across Italy, and the reader encounters works by Meyerbeer, Wagner, and Verdi, as well as those of the lesser-known Petrella. The five chapters examine scores of operatic works—most chapters contain hermeneutic readings of specific scenes—and intersect with the many participants and components of opera productions, as uncovered through painstaking archival efforts (the forty pages of endnotes are a treasure trove for any reader).

Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature. Ed. by Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston

As I write this review, the treatment and perception of material remain very much in the public eye, as news reports and social media alike are dominated by accounts of the lying in state of the late Queen Elizabeth II, with people queuing for hours, days, at a time to view her mortal remains in Westminster Hall in London. The materiality of the pageantry and its historical origins have been much debated. The Queue to view the casket (capitalized into a phenomenon) is itself being cited by some commentators as one of the greatest ever pieces of public theatre and can be productively read in relation to the examples of ‘archaeo-theatrics’ cited by Jonathan Gil Harris’s chapter in Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature (2021). These events are exceptional in so many ways, but the capacity of the physical to embody the intangible, or more broadly, how humans relate to the physical world around us, has long been studied by archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists amongst others. Scholars of literature may have arrived more recently at this destination, but as John Hines, the author of the final essay in Material Remains, highlights, ‘a welcome development in literary studies of the last decade or so has been the emergence of a serious and extensive engagement not only with the history but also with the archaeological materiality of the past in relation to literature’ (p. 240). The material turn in literature began in earnest in the 1990s, but from 2001, when it was used by Bill Brown in a piece of the same name in Critical Inquiry, Thing Theory has emerged as a dominant framework of literary enquiry.1

Gendered Orientations around Domestic Objects; A Study of Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life

When Daniel Miller asked ‘Why some things matter?’, it became critical to question why they matter differently for various genders. This paper is an attempt to analyze how ‘orientations’ around objects play out differently for the female gender in Sarah Pink’s (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic and Everyday Life. The domestic space of research informants in England and Spain is taken up to explore not only how orientations are different for the female genders, but how they also go on to reinforce gender roles. Thus works of foundational thing theorists like Bill Brown, Bruno Latour and Daniel Miller’s ideas of subject-object relations are critiqued and revealed to be inadequate until gender is factored in. Additionally, the paper also reveals how bodies then purposely attempt to break out of gender roles by molding their subject-object relations. Ultimately, things end up shaping our mind more than we can fathom.

“Mackerel and Porpoise / Was This the Last of Us”: The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”

This article reads Susan Howe’s poem “Periscope” (2017) to examine how it challenges liberal humanist strands of thinking about the supposed centrality and privileged position of humans while opening up new ways of representing humans vis-a-vis the non-human. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concepts of “nomadic subjectivity,” “figuration,” and “transversality,” Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” and Pieter Vermeulen’s “Posthuman Affect,” the study looks into how the poet’s preoccupation with the agency of the other-than-human species depicted in the poem leads to a posthumanist interpretation. It also examines how the narrator questions the boundaries between human and non-human, animate and inanimate in order to evoke uncanny effects that are best realized in the form of post-human defiant challenges to liberal humanist models of subjectivity. The poet, it is argued, creates a suggestive visionary engagement and encounter with the natural world and “anthropomorphized things” in an attempt to awaken historical consciousness to give voice to the non-articulated Other.

Comparison of Frequency of Body Dysmorphic Disorder in Applicants of Abdominoplasty with Applicants of Other Cosmetic Surgeries.

BACKGROUNDBody Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a psychic disorder in which a person is dissatisfied with their normal appearance. Identifying these people among the applicants for cosmetic surgery leads to the proper decision about the cosmetic procedure of these patients and their postoperative consequences.METHODSThis cross-sectional study was performed on 250 women referred to a private Plastic Surgery Clinic in Mashhad, Iran from 2016 to 2017. Applicants were divided into two groups as abdominoplasty and other cosmetic surgeries. BDD was assessed using the modified form of the Bill Brown Questionnaire. Applicants’ information including age, marital status, number of children, education level, and history of cosmetic surgeries were recorded.RESULTSThe mean BDD score in the abdominoplasty group and another group was 93.6 ± 23.5 and 75.5 ± 25.8, respectively. There was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the BDD score (P-value < 0.001). Although there was a notable relation between BDD score and marital status, no significant association between BDD score, age, and education level was found.CONCLUSIONConsidering the exact criteria of BDD, we noticed a significant increase in the frequency of BDD in abdominoplasty applicants. It was erroneous and could be explained by not applying the accurate diagnostic criteria of BDD.

Spatializing material–corporeal entanglements: A new materialist approach to the agential work of costume in the stage adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2018)

This article argues for the value of conceptualizing the agency of costume in performance when it is not worn directly upon the body. I employ a new materialist framework to examine the spatial dynamics of the shifting corporeal–material relations established when costume is set apart from an actor onstage and, unworn, asserts its agency as an independent force distinct from the performer. My investigation is supported by a close analysis of Bryony Lavery’s page-to-stage adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), directed by Melly Still and performed at the Royal &amp; Derngate, Northampton in 2018. Drawing upon the observation of rehearsals and performances encountered as an embedded researcher, my discussion centres on the live practices of theatrical production. Employing Bennett’s new materialist thinking laid out in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) and Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ (2001, 2015), my discussion of The Lovely Bones shows costume to be an active participant in a ‘distributive agency’ enacted between garment and performer, the contours of which are amplified when the two are set apart. The spatial disentanglement of the material and corporeal, evidenced in the performance of costume in The Lovely Bones, thus provides an opportunity to present a fuller understanding of the material agency of the stage.

“Daft naff Scottish things”: Stuff, Waste and Memory Objects in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of thingness, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of stuff, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s animacy, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.

A Knot, A Network, A Thing, A World: Composition as Generative Meaning-making in Still Life Photography

Elements move towards, cohere, and separate. It is in this ontogenetic and generative coherence – the composition – that meaning is created. This article positions still life photography as a non-representational, ontogenetic, and generative coherence of thought, matter, and meaning: what Tim Ingold describes as a knot, what Donna Haraway describes as a network, what Martin Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Elizabeth Grosz describe as a thing, and what Kathleen Stewart describes as a world. The photographic images in A Knot, A Network, A Thing, A World present an alternative to photography as representation and/or documentation, instead centring its composition as a moving-towards of human and non-human elements continually coming into being, generating new meanings and compositions.

Registration of ‘KS Hamilton’ hard red winter wheat

AbstractHard winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a major crop in semi‐arid western Kansas. The objective of this research was to develop a hard red winter wheat cultivar for western Kansas with high grain yield potential, good baking quality, and resistance to the important diseases in this region, including Wheat streak mosaic virus, Barley yellow dwarf virus, stripe rust, leaf rust, stem rust, and Hessian fly. ‘KS Hamilton’ (Reg. no. CV‐1188, PI 699003) hard red winter wheat was developed by the wheat breeding program at the Agricultural Research Center‐Hays, Kansas State University, and released by the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station in 2020. KS Hamilton was selected from a three‐way cross of KS08HW176‐4//‘Bill Brown’/KS08HW61‐2. It was released for the dryland production in western Kansas. KS Hamilton was developed using a modified bulk breeding method. KS Hamilton is an F6‐derived line and was tested in yield trials for 6 yr. KS Hamilton has an intermediate maturity and plant height and an average straw strength. It has moderate tolerance to grain shattering and good winterhardiness. KS Hamilton has high grain yield potential in western Kansas and a good disease resistance package, including resistance to Wheat streak mosaic virus, stem rust, and Hessian fly; moderate resistance to Barley yellow dwarf virus; and intermediate resistance to stripe and leaf rusts. KS Hamilton has an average test weight and an above‐average baking quality.

Diaspora memory-objects

Objects are not just ‘objects’ but are connected to people and memory. My paper asks: how can objects help authors write from diverse experiences? I answer this question through a diasporic lens. Objects of ritual have strong importance in Judaism and cultural objects are often passed down throughout the generations. I analyse examples from writers, theorists, and curators, including Mark Baker and his memoir Thirty Days (2017); object theorist Bill Brown; Mireille Juchau and her essay ‘The Most Holy Object in the House’; postmemory theorists Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer; curator Alla Sokolova; Marie Kondo and her use of the Japanese term ‘mono no aware’ (the pathos of things), and my own poetry collection Amnesia Findings (2019). Through this research, I arrive at a closer understanding of how objects can help writers respond to complex and hybrid experiences using memory-objects, and by writing through Things.

Empathet(H)Ics: Intersubjectivity, Interobjectivity, and (Non)Human Storytellers in Colum Mccann’s Let The Great World Spin

Tracing some of the inflection points in our conceptualization of empathy, social cognition, intersubjective understanding, and social theories over time, this essay attempts to contextualize and give a possible explanation to the more radical changes determined by the so-called nonhuman turn. Drawing on the theories proposed by Steven Connor, Bill Brown, and Bruno Latour on the relations between human and nonhuman agents, the paper will argue for the inherent potential of things to both exceed the limits of human agency and cognitive capacities (specifically, memory and intersubjective understanding) and foster their expansion. A reading of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will emphasize the importance of interobjectivity as a mechanism of augmenting empathy and intersubjective understanding. The polyphony of narrativized memories of loss, mourning, trauma – and even pre-trauma, in their construction of an alternative history to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, uses things to encode, store, and retrieve memories, as well as to facilitate (re)connections with others beyond boundaries of space, time, or death. Thus, the democratic force of storytelling returns to corroborate “a democracy extended to things” (Latour).

Introduction

The scholars who present their work here in this Special Issue on Writing Through Things: Past and Broken Things were invited to contribute their research in the form of a traditional article or creative work that explores the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us; to explore that ‘unexplored world’ of ‘memory, emotion, and untapped creativity’ (Pollack, 2011: 230). The events of 2020, lockdowns and self-isolating, meant that we were, perhaps more than ever, surrounded by our own things, offering an opportunity to see these things differently and maybe more clearly. Bill Brown explains that “the work being done… under thing theory is addressing how it is that the inanimate object world helps to form and transform human beings. Part of that is to say: how does our material environment shape us?” (Brown, 2012). We, as writers and researchers, are concerned with that which forms and transforms us and the world around us. These catalysts of formation and transformation can be people, experiences, landscapes, and sometimes they can be the seemingly everyday objects that surround us. As Brown points out, the things that impact on us do not have to be those of ‘economic value in Marxist terms’; they can be ‘small things’ of ‘symbolic value’ (Brown, 2012).

Stranger/Medieval Things: An Introduction

Stranger/Medieval Things: An Introduction Julie Singer What literacies are needed in order to read the medieval object today? Conversely, what light can readings mediated through medieval objects shed on the contemporary world? The aim of this issue of Digital Philology is to explore how the opacity of medieval objects, their very strangeness, makes them a useful lens for thinking through contemporary technologies and contemporary formulations of the digital corpus. Here strange should not be understood as “odd” but in its more etymological sense: “outside,” “external,” “distant.” What happens when medieval strangers are brought to bear on contemporary questions from which they might seem especially distant? What meanings are produced when we think through things that make themselves felt through their absence, or through things that highlight the gaps between and within themselves? With the language of thinking through, I mean to capture two ways of thinking: using modern technologies as an analytical tool and taking modern technologies themselves as an object of medievalist analysis. In thus defining this issue’s stakes, I am thinking specifically of Bill Brown’s use of a dirty window to illustrate his distinction between objects and things.1 Simply put, a clean window, through which we can look at something else in order to make meaning, is an object; a dirty window, no longer transparent, is a thing that draws attention to its own materiality and creates a new kind of subject-object relation. Increasingly, computers, networks, and digital artifacts are the windows through which today’s researchers view medieval books and artworks. When we use these tools, what are we truly looking at? An enormous body of literature has been devoted in recent years to the practical and theoretical implications of the digitization of medieval texts: mostly laudatory, occasionally skeptical, but always impassioned. And with good reason: “the computer rules our research and studies.”2 The availability of digital surrogates is beginning to rival the availability of accessible modern editions as one of “the primary determinants of [End Page 1] canonization in teaching and scholarly practice in Medieval Studies,” as Heather Bamford and Emily C. Francomano have warned.3 Digitized manuscripts are alluring, thanks to the increased accessibility they afford, eliminating the geographical barriers built into traditional archival research. In times of pandemic, unrest, or restricted travel and immigration, they permit researchers to examine facsimiles of medieval objects from the comfort and safety of home. Online tools have enabled a burgeoning number of innovative and often collaborative projects, such as those described in the recent Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature and in Michelle Warren and Neil Weijer’s contribution to this issue. Digital editions also show the potential to recapture dimensions of the medieval manuscript codex that were irreproducible in the printed critical edition.4 But digitizations’ apparent immediacy (in the sense of unmediatedness, as set forth by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin) is only illusory.5 Our study of medieval objects is increasingly, but almost invisibly, dependent on the contemporary objects through which we study them: objects whose “double mimetic illusion” operates at the levels of both screen and machine.6 That dependency comes to the fore in the essays collected in this themed issue of a journal, one that is, after all, available exclusively in a digital format. In many ways, the medieval codex and its digital or hypertextual replica share a fruitful and even uncanny resemblance. Medieval book history can be thought of as a succession of innovations in platform and process; it has often been claimed in recent years that “the digitized medieval manuscript [. . .] recaptur[es] something of the materiality and objecthood of the original.”7 Indeed, the purported similarities or analogies between manuscripts and digital media are commonly cited as a rationale for engagement with medieval things—medieval books, in particular—on contemporary terms. Computing metaphors have pervaded an entire generation of medieval literary scholarship, beginning with Stephen G. Nichols’s New Philology and its conception of the “manuscript matrix” as an “interactive space.”8 The metaphors operate in the other direction, too, with early digitization efforts characterized as the “digital incunable”—or somewhat less optimistically, as artifacts of the “digital dark ages.”9...

Commerce and Consumers: The Ubiquitous Chest of the Late Middle Ages

Contrary to their ubiquity within written, visual, and material sources, chests have largely remained overlooked in studies of the late Middle Ages. Bill Brown’s “thing theory” helps to explicate the ways in which chests can transform from unnoticed “things” in the background to meaningful “objects” when viewed through their entanglements with commercial, consumer, political, and moral concerns. The interdisciplinary study of chests in the late Middle Ages brings together a range of evidence including inventories, guild accounts, court pleas, contemporary writings, images, and material culture from Burgundy, France, and England.

The Uncanny Afterlife of Dolls: Reconfiguring Personhood through Object Vivification in Gothic Film

This article proposes an investigation of the ways in which the figure of the non person in/animate body operates in Gothic cinema. It will focus on human-like objects, specifically dolls, in order to investigate the key narrative and aesthetic discourses they facilitate regarding hollowness and life. These entities establish a frightening dynamic between stasis and real or imagined (yet always unwanted) movement. In the process, they become haunting symbols of liminality that articulate particular ideas about identity and personhood, while also stressing the permeable boundaries between self and other. Gothic things undermine the normal subject-object relation and thus continually destabilize the demarcations between life and death or sanity and insanity. In so doing, they furthermore expose an irrational attitude towards existence and consciousness. Using an object-oriented approach that draws on Elaine Freedgood’s and Bill Brown’s thing theory, I explore the disruptive tendencies that in/animate agents foster in such films as Maria Lease’s Dolly Dearest (1991), Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), and Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). I will focus on these case studies to examine the manner in which Gothic dolls activate uncanniness to represent subjectivity in crisis. In analyzing the figure of the doll to investigate the uneasy relationship between human beings and human-like things, this paper contributes to the growing interest surrounding the role of objects in Gothic cinema.