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.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.