Brown B. Other Things

The University of Chicago, USA, 2015. — 448 p. — ISBN: 9780226076652, 0226076652.From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, and Don DeLillo.
The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself.Overture (The Shield of Achilles)
Things—in Theory
The Matter of Modernism
The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf)
The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray)
Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick)
Unhuman History
The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour)
Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/ Harold Searles)
Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen)
Kitsch Kulchur
How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story (Shawn Wong)
Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny (Spike Lee)
Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object.
Coda. A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard