Bill Brown Research Articles

Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing

Book Review| August 01 2013 Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing Bogost, Ian, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 166 pp. Bill Brown Bill Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (3): 554–556. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2281855 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bill Brown; Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing. Common Knowledge 1 August 2013; 19 (3): 554–556. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2281855 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

When the shoe is not an object: the chinela as thing in Lope de Vega's El caballero de Olmedo

This study conceives women's shoes in Lope de Vega's classic play El caballero de Olmedo [The Knight of Olmedo] to be what Bill Brown would call “things.” The first part of the article visualizes what an image of those shoes, or chinelas, might look like. It also contrasts Lope's treatment of chinelas in El caballero de Olmedo with another of his plays, Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña [Peribáñez and the Commander from Ocaña], and with a short play by Miguel de Cervantes. The second part of the essay elucidates how the chinelas are not an object in El caballero de Olmedo through which characters acquire subjectivity nor are they conventional inanimate objects. Instead, they play an active role as character. Lope dramatizes the characterization through the shoes’ belatedness; they always arrive too late because Lope has transformed them into other stage props – words on a piece of paper about chinelas and ribbons from the chinelas.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come” Bill Hardwig (bio) Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is frequently associated with the tradition of literary naturalism. Barcley Owens, for example, considers McCarthy’s novels in the context of theories of naturalism, and Steven Frye articulates McCarthy’s “romantic naturalism,” while James Giles argues that contemporary naturalism comprises a “multilayered determinism” visible in Outer Dark (2). Dana Phillips characterizes McCarthy’s narration as “radically unanthropocentric” (446), and Eric Carl Link discusses McCarthy’s critique of the “cosmic optimism” of American exceptionalism (“McCarthy” 157). Especially in his early work, but really in nearly all of his fiction, McCarthy is committed to a project of peeling away social and cultural conventions in order to explore the non-contingent humanity/animality that undergirds our existence. This reduction of life to its barest realities is one that characterizes many classic naturalist texts. Such a commitment to a naturalist perspective, however, makes McCarthy’s work fit less obviously within science fiction or speculative fiction more broadly. Part of McCarthy’s naturalist impulse involves looking back to a distant, primal, and biological past, one that is antecedent to contemporary social mores or speculative thoughts about the future. At times, McCarthy’s backward gaze and his love of archaic language feel stubbornly resistant to the goals of science fiction. In Future Present, Michael Pinsky characterizes contemporary science fiction as being inextricably tied to the undetermined future, a genre that “favors indeterminacy: probabilities, chaos, wave functions. It resists its own traditional assertions of certainty. . . . Science fiction writes the future. And according to sf, our future apparently consists of both external encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and internal encounters—the mysteries of the human mind and body” (13). For the reasons I mentioned [End Page 38] above, this description does not mesh well with much of McCarthy’s fiction, especially his Tennessee novels and the early Western fiction. It does, however, resonate with McCarthy’s most popular and recent novel, The Road (2006), which is heavily invested in the uncertainty of the future and contains both Pinsky’s sense of dramatic external encounters (post-apocalyptic destruction) and internal ones (the thoughts of the protagonist as he struggles to survive and to justify this struggle). How, then, to account for McCarthy’s science fiction turn in The Road? What does this shift from the distant past to the indeterminate future do for the ways we conceptualize McCarthy’s work? In this essay, I argue that McCarthy looks to science fiction’s gaze into the future as a means of exploring the issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a manner different from his earlier work. By imagining the unrealized and destroyed future, The Road reverses McCarthy’s tendency to remove from his narrative the entanglement of modern objects. In this speculative novel, he swivels his orientation towards, rather than away from, cultural artifacts, towards “things.” Bill Brown has developed an approach to literary texts that he calls “thing theory,” an approach that explores the “complex roles that objects have played in American lives” (“Thing” 12). McCarthy’s intense treatment of human-made things in The Road, the proliferation of his use of the term “thing” in the novel, and the tender treatment of these things by the book’s narrator, so different from McCarthy’s desire to shed his narrative of frivolous objects of civilizations, can best be accounted for by thinking about the aesthetic choices he makes when imagining the future. In other words, most of McCarthy’s fiction looks to the past, or the soon-to-be-paved-over present, and sees the trappings of culture and materialism as part of an entire system of forces that lead to artificial and false engagements with living and the world.1 In The Road, these trappings become filled with a radiant power, as McCarthy imagines the disappearance of the world and considers the world that will never be. When faced with the erasure of our current culture, things become resonant with an at times nostalgic meaning for what is gone and at other times a poignant meaning of the expectation of a future that such things evoke...

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Dayton IEEE section places a display case at the wright brothers institute Tech^Edge innovation and collaboration center

The Dayton Section Chairman, Dr. Rob Ewing, and Secretary, Dr. Steve Hary, unveiled the IEEE Dayton Display Case at a ceremony held at the Wright Brothers Institute's Tech^Edge facility on December 4 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> , 2012. The purpose of the display case is to highlight the many Dayton based IEEE member's contributions to the field of electrical engineering. Mr. Les McFawn, the Director of the Wright Brothers Institute, welcomed attendees and gave a presentation highlighting the significant capabilities of the Innovation and Collaboration Center, a facility that aims to bring together diverse joint teams working toward rapid solutions to pressing national and regional needs. Erwin Gangl, the current AESS Awards Chairman, discussed the contributions of seven local recipients of the AESS Pioneer Award in its 64 year history. They were: 1979 - Peter R. Murray - for Pilotless Aircraft 1987 - Rudy Stampel - for Weather Satellite Automatic Picture Transmission 1992 - Bill Eppers - for Laser Systems 1993 - Bill Bahret - for Stealth Technology 2003 - Bill Brown & Russ Boario - for Development in fine Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar 2004 - Erwin Gangl - for Mil-Std-1553 Multiplex Data Bus Development

“Incarnational Art”: Thing Theory and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

AbstractFlannery O’Connor’s fiction confounds contemporary critics and readers with its combination of grotesque, violent imagery, and a deeply consistent, thematic concern with religion. This article argues for a new methodology of reading O’Connor that will enrich this seeming incongruence, by first examining the role of objects, such as those inWise Blood, through the lens of thing theory. Heidegger’s idea of the thing and Bill Brown’s thing theory offer readers a mode of interpreting objects that expands the traditional sense of symbolism and encourages a broader understanding of the multiple layers of significance—both the functional and metaphysical—encompassed in things that play a major role inWise Blood, such as the car, gorilla suit, and mummy. Through a close reading ofWise Blood, the author demonstrates thing theory’s potential as a tool to account for O’Connor’s incarnational aesthetic, and to overcome the tendency to relegate her fiction to purely religious or secular spheres.

Idea rzeczy i idee w rzeczach

We fragmencie wstępu do książki "A Sense of Things" Bill Brown problematyzuje relację powierzchni i głębi przedmiotów w amerykańskiej poezji modernistycznej. Brown wychodząc od sentencji Williama Carlosa Williamsa - No ideas but in things - rozważa teoretyczną możliwość istnienia idei w rzeczach (zamiast idei rzeczy). Odwołując się do poezji Williamsa, ale też fotografii Stranda, tekstów Benjamina i Baudelaira (w obu przypadkach poświęconych doświadczeniu dzieci) przedstawia propozycję myślenia rzeczami, a jednocześnie stawia pytania o współczesne społeczne formy relacji ludzi i rzeczy.

Things that matter: Rrepresenting everyday technological things in comics

This article will consider the representation of the things that constitute our digital everyday in Danica Novgorodoff’s Refresh Refresh (2009), and comic strips commissioned by The Guardian for a series titled ‘A cartoonist’s view on the world we live in’ (2012). It will study the work of drawing the digital: how do we depict computers and networks in graphic narratives? And what specific decisions and discourses are brought to bear through the affordances of image-text narratives? Taking an understanding of ‘things’ from Bill Brown’s ‘Thing theory’, and Bruno Latour’s ‘From matters of fact to matters of concern’, this article will argue that computers are elusive cultural objects that will always resist straightforward narrative, and that in representation, thinking of computers as things might proffer an expansive frame of reference. Using this assertion as a theoretical base it will offer a critical approach to graphic texts that are considered in their representation of the digital; suggesting that graphic narratives offer a particular set of representational tools for depicting the digital in all its complex thingliness.

The Turn Away from Marxism, or Why We Read the Way We Read Now

The Turn Away from Marxism, or Why We Read the Way We Read Now Charles Sumner (bio) [End Page 26] The title of this essay refers to a 2009 special issue of Representations—The Way We Read Now—coedited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. In the introduction to the issue, the editors focus on new methods of criticism that “attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths,” a practice that they call “surface reading.”1 As they argue, surface reading is designed to challenge the critical hegemony of “symptomatic reading,” a Marxist and psychoanalytic mode of interpretation that “took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter.”2 But whereas Best and Marcus describe how surface reading is practiced, they never ask why it is gaining favor. They provide a mere surface reading of various examples of surface reading, a descriptive taxonomy that issues in a form of positivism and thereby demonstrates the interpretive limitation of their literary critical program. Still, Best and Marcus enunciate a number of important themes taken up by other critics in a general turn away from Marxism. Reacting against the Left’s apparent disregard for aesthetic pleasure and appreciation, critics increasingly valorize the affective powers of literature that distinguish it, and art more generally, from putatively extra-aesthetic modes of expression. Thus Teresa Ebert sees in contemporary cultural criticism a renewed interest in the category of the concrete, but one which jettisons politico-economic concerns and instead defends “the singular, the sensuous, and the affective” in order to establish what she calls “a delectable materiality.”3 Similarly, Marjorie Levinson has identified a Kantian strain of New Formalism which posits a sharp division “between history and art, discourse and literature, with form . . . the prerogative of art.”4 In turn, the move to isolate this prerogative indicates concern about “the transformation of literary studies into sociohistorical study over the past twenty years.”5 Further still, Bill Brown conceives “thing theory” as a move beyond Marx when arguing that, in Capital, “however aesthetically ambitious his account of the commodity may be, the aesthetics of the commodity itself are utterly beside the point.”6 And to return to surface reading, Best and Marcus worry contamination of the aesthetic by rejecting the psychoanalytic and Marxist “metalanguages,” which, they assert, enabled interdisciplinary exchange in the 1970s and 1980s.7 This essay joins close analyses of surface reading and of thing theory because, in their efforts to move beyond or relinquish psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to literary and cultural studies, they inadvertently demonstrate a continuing and urgent need for these very approaches. This urgency can be registered in the fundamental nature of a problem encountered by both surface reading and thing theory, namely how to determine what the surface of an object or text is without first understanding the “deep history” of its production. Best and Marcus eschew this history because, they argue, the legacy of symptomatic reading conditions critics to overvalue history at the expense of attention to textual surfaces. Reacting against this tendency, they take “surface” as a given and self-identical category, a move that proves especially problematic in their reading of media productions that by definition mediate manifest surface content. This assumption of a given and self-identical surface also impoverishes Brown’s interpretation of literary representations of commodities, the aesthetic effects of which depend on erasing any trace [End Page 27] and awareness of production history. In simply accepting this erasure, Brown ends up reading not commodities cum artworks but tokens of ideology masquerading as art. Surface reading and thing theory thus raise a number of questions pertinent to all readers of literature, and not just to those with particular theoretical loyalties: What, exactly, is the surface of a literary text, or, for that matter, of any sort of cultural text or object? Can we distinguish different types of surfaces? And, if so, how can we reconcile the experience of pleasure with an act of interpretation which, in the process of distinguishing various types of aesthetic surfaces, endangers whatever pleasure they might yield? I will try to show that we can answer these questions if...

The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame (review)

CRONIN, JAN. The Function: An Inside-Out Guide to Novels of Janet Frame. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011. 222 pp. $35.00. Published in May 2011, Jan Cronin's The Function is, if I count well, tenth monograph to be entirely dedicated to study of New Zealand's best-known author Janet (1924-2004). Aside from constituting a significant contribution to Janet scholarship, Cronin's study is, as its title indicates, a helpful inside-out guide for students and teachers alike insofar as it delineates author's system of stagings or enactments (13) and in so doing facilitates navigation across or around Frame's sea of ideas. To anyone unfamiliar with but wishing to apply a similar inside-out approach to another author, Cronin's work certainly a first-rate starting point. Amateurs will also relish inclusion of an important segment of Framean paratext--i.e, reviews of novels, interviews with and, courtesy of Janet Literary Trust, fragments from Frame's unpublished correspondence with Bill Brown--which Cronin utilizes to circumscribe Frame's artistic intentions and measure effects of the frame function on readers and reviewers. Within ambit of Janet scholarship, specificity of Cronin's contribution resides in its postulating that Framean text characterized by operation of a prescriptive authorial presence (19) and that resulting tension between discourse and story or, as she expresses it, between a text works and what it says (13), determines tenor, and reception, of a text. Faces in Water (1961) for instance polarized around Frame's desire to trigger off a compassionate response to madness and her commitment to notion of madness as inviolable and inscrutable (31). To preserve and advance both agendas, author has no choice but to deflect reader's attention away from that [inviolable] otherness (35). A similar tension between how and what underpins A State of Siege (1966) where Frame tempts reader into replicating Malfred's [the main protagonist] reading practices (46) although, this time, text itself geared against Malfred's Neoplatonist (41) interpretations, her pursuit of ideals (41) beyond shadow world. To enact a privileged scheme, quite prepared, then, to interrupt any attempt at creative collaboration (50) on reader's part--the reader, Cronin explains, is very much marshaled by whether s/he realises it or (50). In same vein, author displays a surprising propensity in The Edge of Alphabet (1961), Scented Gardens for Blind (1964) or Intensive Care (1970) for using her characters as vehicles for enactment of central preoccupations (67)--at cost, sometimes, of their credibility as human beings. As such, image that emerges from Cronin's work of as a manipulating demiurge dangling characters and readers alike at other hand of authorial umbilical cord not flattering for her audience. Yet, in granting both a tyrannical agency and a voice of her own (through inclusion of her letters and interviews), Cronin goes some way towards contravening a well-worn tendency among 'experts'--be they doctors or critics--to maintain erroneous diagnosis of as a schizophrenic or to re-diagnose her, posthumously, with autism in order perhaps to explain away complexities of her art. A corollary achievement of The Function that it shows process through which herself flouts authority of some characters but also, even more daringly, of entire narratives. …

THINKING OBJECTIVELY: AN OVERVIEW OF “THING THEORY” IN VICTORIAN STUDIES

For those of us whose life's work consists of the study of the Victorian Era, nothing is plainer than the fact that one cannot escape from “things.” Indeed, for many of us the wealth of detail and artefact available is one of the attractions of the era: who could resist the hats, coaches, buttons, newspapers, lengths of ribbon, packets of tea, bits of old lace, sugared plums, ink pots, keys, and pocket watches that clutter the pages of Dickens, overflow from Gaskell, and crowd in amongst the characters of Collins, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and Brontë? The Victorians had a preoccupation with and predilection for the careful and considered acquisition and utilisation of objects, and this preoccupation has become a focus for critical trends in this area. In 2003, Lynn Pykett wrote that “The Victorians were fascinated with objects and things – but recent scholarship has proved equally fascinated with this Victorian obsession” (1). This obsession can be traced back to a turn in Victorianist criticism in the 1980s, beginning with Brigg's Victorian Things and based on theories of commodity culture in writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, towards an interdisciplinary interest in material culture and particularly in consumer culture and theories of consumption and commodification. More recently critics have moved away from Marxist explorations of objects as commodities, to explore the possibilities of the object in contexts other than those generated by discourses of exchange value, production, and consumption, adopting cultural materialist and new historicist approaches to the objects of Victorian culture and literature. This movement has become known as “Thing Theory.” Starting with Bill Brown's seminal work, A Sense of Things, in 2003, critics have sought for ways of explaining the relationship between the subject and the object in terms other than those of the capitalist market system, in order to take account of the complexities of the object as a signifier. This review seeks to give an overview of these two critical perspectives on the objects of Victorian studies, from the roots of “thing theory” in consumer culture and commodity studies, to the key texts and indicative readings which have shaped “thing theory” as a discipline. Starting with a look at some key texts on consumer culture in the nineteenth century, I then move on to look at those “thing theory” works which have moved away from a focus on the object as commodity, towards cultural materialism and an understanding of the Victorian “object” beyond its role in consumer culture. Finally, I look at some readings indicative of the work currently being published in the field.

Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience ed. by Alexander Regier, Stefan H. Uhlig

284 BOOK REVIEWS difficult this history is but also how much the Romantics were obsessed with it. But this book is not a history of money and Romanticism nor, I think, was it intended to be. Writing such a history would have under­ mined Rowlinson’s and the Romantics’ nuanced understanding of capital­ ism and literature’s “curious” relation to it. Alexander Dick University of British Columbia Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig, eds. Wordsworth's Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language, Experience. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. l’p. vii + 220. $75.00. “What has a poet to do with a theory?” William Whewell asked. In their introduction to Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory, Alexander Regier and Stefan Uhlig respond that “Wordsworth makes his contribution to our modern ways of thinking about poetry both inside his poetic writing and alongside it,” and moreover that his theory “forms a decisive part of his work’s claim on us” (1). Regier and Uhlig’s collection of eleven essays by emerging and well-established scholars explores key areas of Wordsworth’s “poetic the­ ory,” from the poems and prose of Lyrical Ballads to The Excursion and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” At the heart of this book’s wide-ranging analysis of Wordsworth’s aes­ thetic theory is neither the privileging of “low and rustic life” announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads nor the Preface’s controversial claim that the volumes’ poems approximate the “real language ofmen.” It is the Pref­ ace’s most famous, twice-stated, claim: that “all good poetry” is produced by “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” As several essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory help us to see, this claim’s elaboration reveals the inherent difference and complexity that predominate in the creative pro­ cess. Any “good” poem may originate in a superflux of sensation, but po­ etry can at best only point toward that origin by way of mediating kindred feelings and the superadded “pleasures” of material language, form, and meter. As Regier and Uhlig’s book title aptly suggests, the focus of the essays is thus not only upon Wordsworth’s theory of poetry but also upon the “po­ etic” character of that theory and its articulation. In the Advertisement and Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as in the subtler workings of the Essays upon Epi­ taphs and 1850 Prelude, the poet’s theory is poetic in part both because it is predicated upon a complex process and because it posits a poetics of an in­ determinate character, yet situated within the theorized bounds ofa system. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 285 The Preface imparts not just a “systematic defense of the theory” upon which the poems ofLyrical Ballads were composed, as Wordsworth states; it also presents a systematic theory ofpoetic complexity and poetical limits set against a world of experience and material things. Several of the essays in Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory in fact draw upon what Bill Brown and other theorists herald as “thing theory,” concerning the connections between culture, including poetry, and material thinglincss, where a “thing” is that which precedes the categorized object apprehended through perception and representation. Indeed the great virtue of Regier and Uhlig’s collec­ tion is the way it helps us to see familiar aspects ofWordsworth’s theory in new and uncanny ways. The book also serves as a useful companion of sorts to Lyrical Ballads, as ten of the eleven essays consider works from one or both of the volumes. The subtitle of Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory signals three sites of interre­ lated tensions in Wordsworth—knowledge, language, and experience—and in the leadoff essay, “Wordsworth’s Poetic Ignorance,” Andrew Bennett pro­ vocatively addresses the first of these. Following upon his book Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology, he contends that the poet’s works often involve “the possibility of making the reader not know his or her own world” (21). For Bennett, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads ultimately privileges a condition of “not knowing, of ignorance” (21), and the 1798 volume’s “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy” are likewise at bottom agnoiological narratives “consti­ tuted by and constructed around ignorance and around ignorance...

A Diagnostic for Earnings Management Using Changes in Asset Turnover and Profit Margin*

Contemporary Accounting ResearchVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 221-251 A Diagnostic for Earnings Management Using Changes in Asset Turnover and Profit Margin* IVO PH. JANSEN, IVO PH. JANSEN Rutgers University–CamdenSearch for more papers by this authorSUNDARESH RAMNATH, SUNDARESH RAMNATH University of MiamiSearch for more papers by this authorTERI LOMBARDI YOHN, TERI LOMBARDI YOHN Indiana UniversitySearch for more papers by this author IVO PH. JANSEN, IVO PH. JANSEN Rutgers University–CamdenSearch for more papers by this authorSUNDARESH RAMNATH, SUNDARESH RAMNATH University of MiamiSearch for more papers by this authorTERI LOMBARDI YOHN, TERI LOMBARDI YOHN Indiana UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 March 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1911-3846.2011.01093.xCitations: 37 † Accepted by K.R. Subramanyam. We thank Patricia Fairfield for her contributions to the paper, as well as Bill Baber, Walt Blacconiere, Bill Brown, Dave Burgstahler, Prem Jain, Chris Jones, Bin Ke, Jim Ohlson, Scott Richardson, D. Shores, and seminar participants at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Michigan State University, University of Washington, Morgan State University, University of Minnesota, Rutgers University–Camden, Suffolk University, Loyola Marymount University, University of New Hampshire, Villanova University, the Financial Economics and Accounting Conference, and the University of Utah Winter Accounting Conference. We also thank Glass Lewis & Co. for the restatement data. Teri Yohn acknowledges the generous support of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Fellowship. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume29, Issue1Spring 2012 (March)Pages 221-251 RelatedInformation

Repurposing Things in Irish Painting and the Irish Literary Revival

Repurposing Things in Irish Painting and the Irish Literary Revival* Marjorie Howes (bio) Things tell stories. The complexities of the relationship between objects and narratives lie at the heart of this exhibition and are evoked by its title, Rural Ireland: The Inside Story. This relationship forms a rich point of contact between literature and the visual arts. The question that Bill Brown, a literary scholar and a pioneer of “thing theory,” asks of literary texts—“How are objects represented in this text? And how are they made to mean?”—can be asked just as appropriately and productively of paintings.1 One approach to what things mean sees them as cultural artifacts: things tell the stories of the communities that produce and consume them.2 A contrasting approach seeks to treat things in themselves, insisting on what Brown calls the “otherness of objects as such.”3 In this view things tell their own stories. Both methods of reading objects are potentially useful. The first connects them to the human world in which they exist, whereas the second emphasizes the ambiguity and multiplicity of the narratives they generate.4 Literature and the visual arts are concerned with the means of representation as well as with what is represented. As disciplines, they explore both their subject matter and how that subject matter is made to mean. The conscious appropriation and manipulation of things, by people depicted in paintings and literary texts and by painters and writers themselves, emerges as [End Page 17] a major preoccupation in visual and literary works—one that offers an alternative and complement to reading things for their inscrutable “thingness” or for their cultural representativeness. This essay examines how the painter James Brenan, featured in Rural Ireland: The Inside Story, engages with the human and artistic manipulation of things and suggests that this engagement was shared by much literature of the same period. The uses and value of material culture were a significant issue for the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, which began in the 1880s and continued through Irish independence and beyond. Examining the subtle complexities of Revivalist things, Paige Reynolds argues that on the one hand the Revival “aggressively touted its antipathy toward things” in part to enforce a distinction between materialist England and “spiritual” Ireland. “Anti-materialism,” she concludes, “offered the Revivalists a logical ideological weapon in their struggle against imperial culture, given the practical facts that England was rich and Ireland was poor, and that trade laws made Ireland a dumping ground for English commodities while interfering with Irish exportation.” On the other hand, she shows that Revivalist writers often embraced material culture and things, for example by advocating native Irish manufactures as alternatives to “the corrupt English commodities littering Ireland.”5 This complexity in the Revival’s engagement with objects appears as well in an essay by Augusta Gregory, who was, with W.B. Yeats, a key founder of the movement. In 1900 Gregory published “The Felons of Our Land” in London’s Cornhill Magazine. Although the essay documents how Irish people have developed a “spiritual vision” in response to a history of material failure and privation, she finds her evidence for such spirituality within the mundane material things and practices of rural life. Gregory defines felony as “a crime in the eyes of the law, not in the eyes of the people,” examining Irish material culture as part of an ongoing struggle between British [End Page 18] colonial power and Irish resistance.6 Faced with the superior power and resources of the British state, Gregory argues, country people negotiated their relationship to colonial authority, in part by appropriating and repurposing objects. She reports, for example, that “the chief ornament of many a cottage is the warrant for the arrest of a son of the house framed and hung up as a sort of diploma of honour.”7 Like the term “felon,” the warrant means one thing to the British authorities—a legal order to arrest a criminal—and something else to the Irish—an unjust persecution of a nationalist hero. By making the warrant part of the decor of their homes, the Irish have inserted it into an alternative, subaltern narrative and...

The Photo-as-thing

Taking its cue from the recent expansion of critical focus towards the very materiality of the photographic picture (in contrast to a traditional privileging of image content), this essay proposes a theoretical investigation into the topic by applying Bill Brown's ‘thing theory’ to the ‘thingness’ of photography. A ‘photo-as-thing-theory’ is developed here, which introduces the photographic picture as prime example of Brown's thing theory, oscillating as it does between incommensurable thingness and docile objecthood. This ‘photo-as-thing-theory’ is then applied to the more recent development of digital imaging technologies, which are often quoted for their immateriality and lack of thingness in more than one respect: concerning their material volatility, and, more crucially so, regarding photography's mythical relation with the Real.

Marjory Fleming and Child Authors: The Total Depravity of Inanimate Things

Marjory Fleming was a child diarist who wrote during the Romantic period; her diary was published during the Victorian era. Her text and its reception offer a test case for how “thing theory,” as synthesized by Bill Brown, might provide a theoretical approach that productively reconsiders the categories of “the child” and the child author.

Life etc.

Life etc. Mairi MacInnes (bio) After Her Funeral After the funeral my father looked backOver some fifty yearsIn search of a reason for remorse.Humming and whistling, at last he hitOn when they toured the Highlands together,With Billy Miles, in their first car,A two-seater Swift with dickey in the rearThat opened like a lid. My father was driving, her turn in the dickey,Billy inside, snug, smug, and chatty,When a storm broke over Glencoe.She was drenched forthwith,While Billy chatted under cover, dryAnd warm and quite oblivious."How could I do that to her?"My father asked me: "Why let that BillyBlab on and stay dry, dry and under cover,While she was soaked to the skin?" I'd never heard that story before, I lied.There was nothing to forgive.She'd always said he was lovable,Beloved, an excellent man.And I shivered, feeling the desolationForming around me, the chill, the wet, And thought of their flaming rows,Hurled glasses and jugs, shouts in the night,Grapes chucked on the fire like money,Even departures—happenings that now meant nothing. [End Page 220] Bread You take yourself for granted, but if you askwhat I miss most, I'll have to say your bread:how every loaf roof falls to the knife, its oatnuggets loading the cut rift; how crustand rough crumb answer to butter at breakfastwith coffee; how teeth crunch on it as I'm fed,how tongue savors and spit spurts. Your breadputs me in touch with every common lust.For trees up here lean blazing on the field,mountains rise naked from a colored furof leaves like hard embarrassed men, the fallbursts overhead like rockets. Despite allI'm dull with hunger, every sense is sealed,wanting your bread, the body's integer. The Pet I say, "Go away!" to the dog when she pesters meand brings the ball to me once too oftenwhen I want to read, and she leaves obediently but is back in two minuteshaving thought of another of our games.I must have some value, then,though I can't say what that is,stranded as I am at the end of lifelike a castaway watching ships far out at sea. Suddenly though she becomes irresistible,her brilliant black eyes in her brindled peltregistering a ridiculous amount of regard,and now it's as though I'm sailing a small boatamong liners and ferries and container ships,a proper blip upon the radar screen,and I throw the ball for her one more time. [End Page 221] Dancing at Home in the Thirties They rolled back the rugs to reveal the plain boardswhich they sprinkled with crystals to make a smooth floor, trod them in and then seized each other and swooped,glided, out of character, the pair of them sharing a mood, breathily humming or murmuring the words of a song,dancing by themselves without music, so I had to make fun of them both to myself and ran off embarrassed and hid.I don't know what else happened or what they did, excepting the rugs were replaced when I came in again,and they were laughing and humming right up to the evening. So later that night, after the guests came and they'd dined,rugs were rolled back again, and music unwound from seventy-eights on our box of a gramophone,and all danced, transformed, the women in their slinky long dresses, the men in their black tailored suits,white shirts, bow ties, rosetted shoes, elastic-sided boots just visible from the top of the stair as they whirled:portly Bill Brown and Nell, slim Alan, Rita, Dan, Andrea. In the morning—Sunday, of course—my parents slept late.The smell of cigars downstairs, ash in the grate, the furniture still pushed against the walls,the maids bustling. I started to dance by myself till Betty whirled me about. No, let me alone,I protested. I wanted to dance by myself, quite alone. [End Page 222] Mairi MacInnes Mairi Macinnes, a woman...

Introduction: Postmodernism, Then

From our contemporary vantage point, a case can certainly be made for the predictive or, perhaps, programmatic power of David Foster Wallace's 1993 essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. In this essay, Wallace posits a shift away from the postmodern irony of authors such as Don DeLillo, Mark Leyner, and Thomas Pynchon and towards a literature of sincerity that would be pioneered by a younger generation of writers raised with television. (1) And, indeed, in contemporary US literary culture, one can locate a shift away from ironic watching and towards the embrace of single-entendre principles almost everywhere: McSweeney's Quarterly Concern's emo-sincerity the ethnic bildungsroman's emphasis on multicultural identity as upward mobility, Jonathan Franzen's social realism, n+1's enthusiastic recuperation of cultural critique, novelists such as Michael Chabon's heartfelt embrace of genre fiction, and the memoir's ascension of best-seller lists, to name a few (Wallace 81). At the same time, alongside this concerted, professional abandonment of postmodernism's signature affective stance in recent North American literary enterprises, postmodernism has begun to drop of academic discourse as well. While at least since 9/11 critics have been routinely declaring that postmodernism is, now, over, in the last five years an increasing number of critics have also begun to question whether postmodernism was ever a significant aspect of postwar American literary culture. It is these contemporary abandonments of postmodernism that provide the occasion for this special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature: the position papers and essays that compose Postmodernism, Then take the partial if not total eclipse of postmodernism in both contemporary American literature and literary criticism as the condition of possibility for returning to the category of the postmodern. In so doing, this special issue explores how postmodernism means, when can be thought of as not only the present but also the recent past, not only a synonym for the postwar condition but also an instituted critical fiction, not only what conies after the close of high modernism but also as a strain of modernism, not only a unifying category that contains all late twentieth-century literature but also one aesthetic among many. As Andrew Hoberek notes in his introduction to the After Postmodernism special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature, declarations of the decline of postmodernism have become enough of a critical commonplace that has now become something of a critical commonplace to even cite this fact (233-34). And, as Brian McHale elucidates in 1966 Nervous Breakdown; or, When did Postmodernism Begin?, declarations and interrogations of the actual start-date of postmodernism have become equally commonplace (391-93). Of course, the expression of uncertainty about the beginning or end of postmodernity has been a standard feature of periodizing accounts of postmodernism at least since David Harvey prefaced his foundational Condition of Postmodernity by asserting that it does not matter whether postmodernism is or is riot on the way out (ix). Indeed, as Bill Brown suggests in The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory), this recursive process of relocating the periodizing breaks that define postmodernity can, itself, be understood as part of the logic of postmodernism (734-35). (2) And, accordingly, the infinite revisability of postmodernism as a periodizing concept can then be understood as an iteration of the malleability of a postmodernist aesthetic--an aesthetic that underwrites those studies that Ursula Heise describes as ones in which certain sets of postmodern theories and philosophical perspectives (usually, but not always, influenced by one of several strains of French poststructuralism) ... are brought to bear on texts and artworks not necessarily associated with [the post-1960] period (966). From this perspective, the contemporary eclipse of postmodernism might, then, register as its ultimate triumph, as methods of reading or aesthetics once thought to be specifically tied to the postmodern era are now disseminated as reading practices in many, even all, historical periods, and as standard reference points for contemporary art and literature. …

The Popularity of Postmodernism

commonplaces about are themselves burdensome commonplaces. They evacuate nuance and historical understanding, and to notice their performance in spheres both popular and academic is to cringe. (The is no truth line is a prime example; other examples include the equation of postmodernism with intensive irony, as if irony didn't exist until the twentieth-century. Then there is the converse, which is the casual, unelaborated bashing of terms like humanism--or even totality--seen to be postmodernism's opposite.) (1) If postmodernism's urgency as a category of analysis--as a condition (Jameson), or as a poetics (Hutcheon)--no longer carries the same relevance it did even ten years ago, then specificity, a modicum of precision, is yet enormously important, even if describing, as Bill Brown points out, a cultural logic evacuates or eradicates essence (736). Looking through PMLA which is, after all, the official organ of our field--I discovered only three essays published with the words postmodernity, or postmodern in their titles since the turn of the twenty-first century: two in 2005, one in 2007. shift this thinness represents (compared to seven essays overall in the period from 1989-1999) is typical of a shift away from as appellation, its apparatus as nomenclature. This is a shift I can also track in my own work, which is about a subject many take as transparently postmodern--comics. (The form of comics is, broadly speaking, obviously relevant to in that it is, unlike, say, the novel, itself an approximately twentieth-century form, and an inherently self-reflexive one that mixes high and mass modes.) (2) Yet if postmodernism dropped out of my primary critical vocabulary, central concepts and hermeneutics it sponsors or opens up, especially for exploring contemporary forms like comics, remain indispensable. What remains after anxieties about and even interest in taxonomy shed themselves? What is not exhausted even if we are not heralding it as postmodernism anymore? I was keenly interested in in graduate school. I began graduate study in 1999, year of the millennial panic and Matrix; one year before the traumatizing 2000 national election and two years before 9/11. All of my favorite courses had postmodernism in their titles. There was--from three different professors--The 60s and Postmodernism, Postmodern/Postsecular, and Theater and Performance. These courses shaped my thinking profoundly (then and to this day). In my Interest Group, of which I was the nominal organizer, we read and debated College English's Twentieth-Century Literature in the New Century (2001)--a special issue explicitly motivated by the matter of the usefulness of and connections between the categories modern and postmodern. (3) When Orals came around, my methodology list, on feminist theory, had a subsection on Locations that included works such as Blackness (bell hooks), Feminism and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending (Susan Suleiman), The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (Craig Owens), books like Doing lime: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (Rita Felski), and critical volumes such as Feminism/Postmodernism (ed. Linda Nicholson), which operated like a bible for me. My dissertation was heavily engaged with postmodernism, manifest in deep critical engagements with Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson, among other famous articulators of postmodernism. It was about innovative narrative forms whose subject is history--specifically, it is about the possibilities of the medium of comics in this area and I remember thinking, ashamedly, to myself about Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), that I wished my dissertation could simply argue that contemporary comics are historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon's compelling assessment of what constitutes the poetics of postmodernism. …

Those obscure objects of desire

‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation.