What literary works should we look to for new perspectives on materiality? Which methods hold promise today?

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.

Hoarding is too ubiquitous and entrenched to be dismembered by the boundaries of national tradition or discipline.

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.

If postmodern literature reveals the constructed nature of our general categories, then what are the particulars out of which those general categories are constructed?

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.

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

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.