Re-Examining American Literature (REAL) Student Symposium
“You’ll know Her – by Her Vest:” Objects in American Literature and Culture
Where: Online
When: March 22nd, 2025
Description: Landmark works such as Appandurai’s The Social Life of Things (1986) suggest that there has been an increasing interest in material objects in aesthetic and literary theory: things are no longer relegated to anthropological study of material culture, but “strike back” as agents, symbols, narrators, focal points of cultural activity, and by their sheer ubiquity, as the “stuff” that permeates individual and collective lives entirely. Things have become “vibrant matter”, they are “incorporeal”, they are alive! But how do they feature in culture and literature? What are the conventions of representation of objects and matter? Consider two examples: Smith College, the alma mater of Sylvia Plath, holds several thousand items of clothing, as a kind of fashion library, including the largest collection of aprons in the world, and Sylvia Plath’s girl-guide uniform. The collection custodian, Professor Kiki Smith, asks: “For a women’s college to celebrate women’s clothing instead of somehow feeling it devalues the achievements of the college to study ordinary shmattes? It takes guts” (Friedman). The importance of such collections for cultural history is unquestionable, but would that be a previously overlooked background for literary history too? Another example comes from the 1940s: relatively few people bring back the fact that F.O. Mathiessen, author of The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, found it necessary to start the book with a photograph of a noted shipbuilder – to illustrate and define a literary movement in mid-19th century. Why would anyone do that? What objects, or object-makers, would be defining for contemporary literature?
From a more philosophical angle, what do things have to do with philosophical materialism? What does realism have to do with materialism? What roles do things play in fiction, poetry, art, history, geography, politics and media? Does it matter that books and media are things too? How about people: to what extent, and how can persons be materialized and objectified? How do things help shape identities and personalities? Is fashion a materialistic phenomenon? Finally, there are environmental issues: what happens when the world drowns in things? Or in garbage? Consider also Morton’s recent concept of hyperobjects which has shaped our thinking about our inseparable entanglements with the environment.
Institution: Department of American Studies: Literature and Media at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
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