Other Things

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.

"In Brown's supple mind, things are alive. Their theoretical twists and turns and stubborn materiality are not opposites, but interwoven dynamics--material objects in a field of thingness. For more than a decade, Brown has explored the various meanings and operations of things in, and as, literature and the visual arts. His grasp of the subject, control of interpretation, and willingness to take intellectual risks make this book a necessary read for anyone interested in the things that provoke our intellectual curiosity."--James Cuno, The J. Paul Getty Trust, "Brown is a pre-eminent scholar of the material world. . . . Other Things is rigorously conceptual but it is also good company, an enlightening contribution to our understanding of material culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."-- "Times Literary Supplement", "Compelling. . . . The test of Brown's book--which it surpasses and sustains--is that, like the paper clip or rubber band you almost certainly aren't holding as you read this, Other Things will stick in your mind anyway."-- "Modernism/modernity", "For decades now, Brown has been thinking and writing about "thing theory," as he has called it. But in Other Things, he attempts to make clear the connections between his work and the recent surge of critical work involving things, objects, and matter....Brown makes what is likely the most sophisticated and strongest case for literary and historical study within a new materialist framework by suggesting that thingness can best be explained 'in the cultural field, ' rather than through, say, metaphysics."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. He is the author of several books, including A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, also published by the University of Chicago Press.