Object Lessons: The New Materialism in U.S. Literature and Culture

Object Lessons:The New Materialism in U.S.Literature and Culture Michael H. Epp (bio) Bornstein, George . Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. 181 pp. Brown, Bill . A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 235 pp. Brown, Bill , ed. Things. Special Issue of Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001). 354 pp. The three books under review participate in an energetic interdisciplinary turn to "the material" that has come to characterize much current work in American and modernist studies. In Material Modernism, George Bornstein applies current material theories to more traditional bibliographic or print-culture methodologies, emphasizing how much modernist literature is constituted by its materials and, in turn, what those materials can tell us about the politics and history of modernist literature. Things, a special issue of the American journal Critical Inquiry that won the award for Best Special Issue of an academic journal of the Modern Language Association, grapples with a wider range of subjects in an exploratory effort to theorize and historicize "things." Physicist Sidney Nagel ponders the meaning of a drop of glycerol; poet Daniel Tiffany draws links between poetic metaphor and the structure of the universe; art historian Christina Kiaer traces the history of the Russian flapper dress; while others, including Jonathan Lamb, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Michael Taussig write of such diverse "things" as caffeine and aluminium, "it" narratives, and death. While Things, edited by Bill Brown and soon to be published as a book in its own right, represents an early foray in an exciting new direction for theorizing the material, Brown's own A Sense of Things realizes that new direction for the [End Page 305] study of modernist art and literature. Practising the "new materialism" he outlined in The Material Unconscious, Brown takes thing theory and applies it to the "object matter" of American literature to investigate the stuff that appears in modernist narratives (not, as in Bornstein, the stuff in which modernist narratives appear). The authors all apply theory to their objects of interest, but where Bornstein's solid print-culture study is a culmination of old directions, Things and A Sense of Things push materialist theories past their traditional limits, blazing new paths for a burgeoning field of inquiry. While these books share an interest in testing, evaluating, and creating theories of the material, they also embody the conflicts that keep materialist approaches to culture and history so productive. For instance, while Bornstein is interested in politics and theory, he remains committed to a traditional bibliographic practice of recovery and preservation that is imagined as operating somehow outside history, as a methodology that is applied to history rather than actually constituting that history. Brown, on the other hand, is unhappy with materialist studies that assume that merely linking the discursive, the material, and history is the end of material theory, rather than the beginning. Characterizing himself as an "anti-materialist materialist," Brown intervenes in current materialism by taking a radical perspective on history's non-inevitability, critiquing historical models that submit, in the name of a politicized scholarship, to a model of history that sees all things as fully, inevitably transformed by "the market" into object-commodities. By grappling with materialist theory and modernism for remarkably different ends, Bornstein's and Brown's books set in relief emerging contests within modernist, materialist, and print-culture studies. Bornstein introduces Material Modernism as an act of recovery and revaluation that reveals how much contemporary modernist studies neglect the material and political. Returning to the "original sites of production," the first materials of modernism, will point to modernism's multiple lives and multiple futures (1) while substantially altering modes of academic analysis that neglect, in Jerome McGann's terminology, the "bibliographic code" in favour of its more popular linguistic counterpart. Chapter one, "How to Read a Page: Modernism and Material Textuality," in which Bornstein outlines his approach to print-culture theory, is probably the most important section of the book and certainly its most productive. In accessible language, Bornstein introduces key notions of print-culture theory to describe the material process through which literature [End Page 306...