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A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. By Bill Brown. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xiii + 245 pages.
Among the literary texts given close attention in Bill Brown's new book, the earliest, Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper, was published in 1881; the latest, Henry James's American Scene, in 1907. The interval between appears tailor-made for a study of the "object matter of American literature" because it so immediately evokes material things in profusion, from the bric-a-brac of the Victorian domestic interior to the avalanche of items made possible by new technologies of mass production. To the late-twentieth-century imagination, the period seems late enough to share with our own a wide and rapid distribution of commodities, but early enough to precede the more austere aesthetic of modernism-seems, in other words, a time when full shelves in the store had not yet been balanced by empty spaces in the home. It was, as Brown notes, the age when "the typewriter and the fountain pen and the light bulb began to flourish, . . . when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things rather suddenly came to define a national culture" (4).
Brown begins his book with William Carlos Williams's famous dictum, "No ideas but in Things," and a discussion of how difficult it is to apprehend objects as "mere" things. But he quickly goes on to note that this "question of things and their thingness" (14) will not precisely be his question, because it did not emerge full-blown in the literature of his chosen period. It would rather take modernism, gathering steam in or a little after 1907, to demand "direct treatment of the thing" (Pound), to register the diffusion of a commodity aesthetic (Léger), to obsess about the radical divide between consciousness and material Being (Sartre, Heidegger, Adorno). The turn-of-the-century texts Brown examines do not show things begging to be considered in their remoteness from human stories, but rather "ask why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies" (4). A Sense of Things accordingly offers "a prehistory of the modernist fascination with things," detailing some of the ways...