The Literary Life of Things

Case Studies in American Fiction

Babette Bärbel Tischleder

• Publisher: Campus Verlag
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9783593422954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. Engaging a great range of American literature—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen—the book illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.

»Babette Tischleder's readings of texts are no less fresh and forceful than the topics those texts bring into focus: object agency, obsolescence, patina, and (magnificently) the recalcitrance of things. The book is a timely and important contribution to American Studies and to Object Studies both.«

Bill Brown, author of »A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature«

Ob als Gefährten, Alter Egos oder Gegenspieler von Romanfiguren – die Welt der Dinge spielt in der amerikanischen Literatur eine wichtige Rolle. In Lektüren unterschiedlicher literarischer Prosatexte und ihrer historischen Kontexte zeigt Babette Bärbel Tischleder, wie Autorinnen und Autoren von Harriet Beecher Stowe bis Jonathan Franzen materielle Objekte sprachlich in Szene setzen. Ihre Diskussion neuerer theoretischer Ansätze zu Materialität und Dinglichkeit leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zum »material turn« in den Geisteswissenschaften.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Lively Objects—Scenes of Animation and the American Literary Imagination
• 1. Sentimental Patina: The Ideal Ecology of Objects in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers
• 2. Sacred Objects, Freakish Ornaments: Domestic Environmentalism in the Gilded Age
• 3. The Scent of Things: Edith Wharton, Modern Subjectivity, and the Anatomy of Taste
• 4. Object Trouble: Thing Theory, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and the American Tradition of Recalcitrant Matter
• 5. The Thingness of the Text: Jonathan Franzen’s Rhopography of Obsolescence
• Epilogue: The Afterlife of Things
• Bibliography
• Index