Other Things

The humanities continue to ride a wave of interest in the material or phenomenological object world. Early in the boom in what we might call Thing Studies, Brown observed that "these days you can read books on the pencil, the zipper, the toilet, the banana, the chair, the potato, the bowler hat." By now the list is a good deal longer. How should we understand the broad spotlight now being cast on the inanimate object world within various disciplines? This book sets out to answer that question by reference to objects as various as puppets and glass plate, writers ranging from Virginia Woolf to Philip K. Dick, and artists as various as Rodin and Man Ray. Taken together, the essays in "Other Things" explain modernism's investment in disclosing an object world whose enchantment persists in the face of disenchantment. Working with conceptual tools derived from the work of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Lacan, Brown advances an object/thing distinction that grasps the unanticipated force of an object, no matter how banal that object may be. For Brown, gaining purchase on the world we inhabit requires theory to engage the everyday object world, just as it requires us to ask new questions of material culture, including the question of what we mean by materiality itself.