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Other things / Bill Brown.

By: Publisher: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2015]Description: xiv, 396 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780226076652
  • 0226076652
  • 022628302X
  • 9780226283029
Subject(s):
Contents:
Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Overture (The Shield of Achilles) -- 1. Things-in Theory -- I. The Matter of Modernism -- 2. The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf) -- 3. The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray) -- 4. Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick) -- II. Unhuman History -- 5. The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour) -- 6. Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles) -- 7. Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen) -- III. Kitsch Kulchur -- 8. How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story(Shawn Wong) -- 9. Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny(Spike Lee) -- 10. Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object -- Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard) -- Notes -- Glossary -- Index.
Summary: From the pencil to the puppet to the drone-the humanities 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? In Other Things, Bill Brown explores this question by considering an 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. Brown 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, he ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Brown 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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Barcode
Book Book CGLAS Library Purple 306.46 BRO (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 11841

Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-370) and index.

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Overture (The Shield of Achilles) -- 1. Things-in Theory -- I. The Matter of Modernism -- 2. The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf) -- 3. The Modernist Object and Another Thing (Man Ray) -- 4. Concepts and Objects, Words and Things (Philip K. Dick) -- II. Unhuman History -- 5. The Unhuman Condition (Hannah Arendt/Bruno Latour) -- 6. Object Relations in an Expanded Field (Myla Goldberg/Harold Searles) -- 7. Objects, Others, and Us (Brian Jungen) -- III. Kitsch Kulchur -- 8. How to Do Things with Things: A Toy Story(Shawn Wong) -- 9. Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny(Spike Lee) -- 10. Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object -- Coda A Little History of Light (Dan Flavin/Gaston Bachelard) -- Notes -- Glossary -- Index.

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone-the humanities 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? In Other Things, Bill Brown explores this question by considering an 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. Brown 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, he ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Brown 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.