Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"Stuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and thus is the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique.Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home de;cor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object.Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built"--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Material culture in literature. --- Property in literature. --- Personal belongings in art. --- Personal belongings in literature. --- LITERARY CRITICISM --- PHILOSOPHY --- Semiotics & Theory. --- Metaphysics. --- Material culture in literature --- Personal belongings in art --- Personal belongings in literature --- Property in literature --- Philosophy

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.

British --- Expatriation in literature. --- National characteristics, British, in literature. --- Sentimentalism in literature. --- Personal belongings in literature. --- Property in literature. --- Material culture in literature. --- English fiction --- History and criticism.