The Literary Life of Things

Nordamerikastudien

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 literaturefrom Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzenthe 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.

Préface
Nordamerikastudien

Auteur
Babette Bärbel Tischleder ist Professorin für Nordamerikastudien an der Universität Göttingen.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction: Lively ObjectsScenes of Animation and the American Literary Imagination Objects are no longer dead. In current critical thought, the material world is gaining much attention, and inanimate matter is seen to possess agency and vitalityto be alive with potential, ontological defiance, and vibrant force. While this renewed focus on questions of materiality in the humanities and the social sciences is a rather recent phenomenon, variously designated as the material turn or the new materialisms, the object world has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination. Because narrative fiction depicts human subjects in the concrete circumstances of everyday life, it is a medium that grants us particular access to a material world that can become fully animate. The worlds conjured up in and by narrative are usually configured as a tangible universe. Be it the built environment of a city, a natural habitat, or the microcosm of the home, material life is depicted as the coexistence of human subjects and inanimate objects. My book shares the current interest in questions of material culture, objecthood, and thingness that W.J.T. Mitchell observes in a number of academic fieldsfrom sociology and political science to literary and cultural studies. Like other new materialist studies, The Literary Life of Things seeks to go beyond the more traditional materialisms inspired by Marx (which remain largely focused on political economy and class relations). It does so in two ways: first, by engaging with the concrete material situations and physical forces that impact and mold human lives, and, second, by spotlighting the cultural, ecological, psychological, affective, perceptive, and aesthetic dimensions of how people relate to inanimate objects and envision these relations. Setting out from these premises, as well as from the observation that objects have a much-neglected life in fiction, my book focuses on making visible scenes of animation in different literary-material settings. It asks how people's lives are propelled by a dynamics of objectshow human aspirations, fantasies, practices, memories, and self-concepts engage the object world in essential ways. Rereading both canonical and lesser-known texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, I explore what I call the material imaginarythe various ways in which literary texts invite us to imagine physical objects in active roles that enable and shape people's actions, social relations, self-fashioning, emotional states, and moral or cultural orientations, as well as the texts' own narrative and aesthetic expressions. It seems a bold claim to say that inanimate things have lives when it is generally understood that they constitute the realm of the inanimate, the inert, the passive backdrop of human action. This book sets out to challenge the common idea of the object world's inertia and lifelessness, and explores how, in American fiction and cultural history, objects are animated in numerous ways. Literary texts encourage us to see our practical, emotional, and imaginary engagement with the nonhuman environment in modes that resist any clear-cut distinction of subjects and objects, the physical and the metaphysical, the animate and the inanimate. The notion of the life of things, then,whether social, cultural, psychological, or plainly physicalis premised on the recognition that human lives are enmeshed in matter and that we have to account for the agency and vibrancy of physical stuff, whether trees, clouds, toys, or elevators. Taking things seriously means to recognize the liveliness that resides in matter itself, that which Jane Bennett calls vital materialitythe capacity of thingsedibles, commodities, storms, metalsnot only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. The awareness that matter is active and potent and has a vitality of its own also informs the material imaginary of the fictional works I consider. This vitality has compelled me to take issue with the familiar distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, the mortal and the immortal, living beings and inanimate stuff. The question of how things are imagined to assume different forms of life in a literary context (and beyond) informs the methodology of this book. Of course, life itself is a complex term that does not only denote the biological quality or condition of animate existence, which distinguishes a living organism from dead matter and would allow us to neatly divide animals, plants, and people, on the one hand, and pebbles, computers, and plastic bags, on the other. Even the first definition the OED gives for life includes capacitiesreproduction, adaptation to the environment, and response to stimulationwhich are not restricted to organic life, but describe mechanical and industrial production, technical artifacts, and digital technologies as well: chromolithography (mechanical reproduction), shock absorbers (adaptation to the road), thermometers or cell phones (chemical and electronic sensitivity to stimulation) are obvious examples. More important, though, life in a comprehensive sense defies the very distinction between animate and inanimate forms of existence. Understood as a vivifying or animating principle, life clearly encompasses the sustaining functions of the object world: both natural things and artificial ones constitute the physical environmentthe very world we live inthat keeps us clothed, sheltered, nourished, oriented, and connected with one another. In their introduction to New Materialisms, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost set out from a similar proposition: As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter. We are ourselves composed of matter. From a phenomenological perspective, it would make little sense to distinguish the living from the dead elements that together constitute our Lebenswelt, especially since life-world means precisely the entirety of an individual's immediate (cognitive, affective, sensuous) experiences, interactions, and relations. It is the world we know and take for granted, the one upon which we unthinkingly rely to still be there when we wake up in the morning. How crucially our life is a fact of material embeddedness is best understood if we try to picture a wo…