Thing Theory in Literary Studies

That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October, "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. The study of matter has proceeded under a number of names: dialectical materialism, material culture studies, and, more recently, vibrant materialism, and object-oriented ontology. The scope of such studies has likewise been expansive, ranging from the sub-atomic to the galactic, from Lucretius to Latour.

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Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory
By
Kinohi Nishikawa
Toni Morrison began to formulate her engagement with the black past early in her career, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia: a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World.
Postmodernism and Thing Theory
By
Matthew Mullins
If postmodern literature reveals the constructed nature of our general categories, then what are the particulars out of which those general categories are constructed?
Things—In Theory
By
Bill Brown

How do the literary, visual, and plastic arts fashion questions about the object world and our relation to it?

The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus
By
Susan Harlan

The treatment of the military subject in Shakespeare’s Roman plays complicates early modern cultural understandings of the material aspects of militant nostalgia. Shakespeare inherits a partial and objectified Roman military figure linked to trophies and armor, and this figure negotiates the early modern English playgoer's relationship to his glorious, unattainable Roman past.

Thing Theory 2017: A Forum
By
Sarah Wasserman
In 2001, when Bill Brown published his essay on “Thing Theory,” it seemed that scholars were tired of subjects. But now, nearly two decades later, one must wonder if we’ve also grown tired of things.
Beating True: Figuring Object Life Beyond Ontology
By
Babette B. Tischleder
One premise different materialist theories share is that things are alive and kicking: no longer inert matter or mere backdrop of human action and consciousness, the world of objects is seen to have a vitality of its own. While it is important to remember that physical things continue to exist after their social lives (in a narrow sense) have ended, we need to complicate the stories we tell about their active trajectories.
Thing Theory at Expanded Scale
By
Kate Marshall
The following remarks form brief meditations on the scalar pressures that several strands of contemporary critical thought have been placing on the well-recognized expanded field of things that have fallen under the purview of thing theory in the past decade and a half.
Related Things
By
David J. Alworth
What is Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Having a Coke with You,” trying to teach you about objects, things, and thingness? 
Metalepsis in Real Time
By
Elaine Freedgood
In Genette’s classic definition, metalepsis is an intrusion of one diegetic level into another. The question of who is narrating, who can narrate, who is a reliable narrator and at what point we are in the outermost diegetic level that we fondly or hopefully think of as reality has become a serious one.
Gold You Can Eat (On Theft)
By
Julian Yates
This chapter constitutes its own order of archival heterospace, keyed to the ways in which orange, the dispersal strategy of particular genus of plant, by and through its recruitment of human animals, comes to interrupt acts of exchange, inclining them toward an economy of the gift or accusations of theft, and so litters our discourses with errant, erring, fragmented, time-bound polities that unfold by and through orange.
Introduction to Hoardiculture
By
Rebecca Falkoff
Hoarding is too ubiquitous and entrenched to be dismembered by the boundaries of national tradition or discipline.
What’s Really the Matter with Artifacts?
By
Crystal B. Lake
Ready-to-hand, memorable things make the immaterial past materially present for our direct, sensory apprehension as well as our cognitive reasoning, but they are also very nearly thinking things themselves, full of memories that we do not and cannot have for ourselves.
An Object for Future Study
By
Michael Doss
Taken together, affect and objects have much to teach us about where we might go next.
New Materialism and the Multicultural Middle Ages
By
T. Liam Waters
Ana C. Núñez
In this episode of The Multicultural Middle Ages podcast, T. Liam Waters (UC Berkeley) and Ana C. Núñez (Stanford) use New Materialism as a disciplinary approach to the Middle Ages, exploring the connections between medieval cultures, times, and places.

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