This module will study the resonances between collectors, artists, poets, and other hallowed figures of modernity, and their less admired or established doubles: hoarders, bibliomaniacs, ragpickers, and gleaners. We will examine the material practices and psychic mechanisms that define these identities and authorize distinctions between them, as well as the historical contexts from which they emerge. More broadly, the module will grapple with the relationships between objects and narrative. We will ask how the human-object practices of collecting, hoarding, gleaning, scavenge, misuse, and fetishism change when performed in the immaterial realm of language, and what these object-practices look like as rhetorical and narrative strategies. A substantial portion of the course will be dedicated to readings of recent work in new materialism, thing theory, and affect theory.

 

Readings will include novels and short stories by James Baldwin, André Breton, Italo Calvino, Bruce Chatwin, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Bohumil Hrabal, Charles Johnson, Virginia Woolf, and others; as well as essays by Arjun Appadurai, Walter Benjamin, Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Sigmund Freud, David Boarder Giles, W. D. King, Bernard London, Francesco Orlando, Adam Phillips, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Susan Stewart, Michael Thompson, Patricia Yaeger. 

                                                                                                           

Aims and Learning Outcomes: By the end of the term students will have improved their skills in close reading and literary analysis and will have gained knowledge of selected works of modern and contemporary literature as well as critical interventions in waste and discard studies, thing theory, new materialism, and other relevant subfields.

 

Preparatory Reading: Susan Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992): 132-169; Jean Baudrillard, “A Marginal System: Collecting,” The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996): 85-106; Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 28.1 Things (Autumn, 2001): 1-22.

  