Lent Term Optional Course
American Things
Dr Edward Allen
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
…
‘Today’ (1950), by Frank O’Hara
This course will trace the shifting fortunes and future prospects of Thing Theory, discovering
ways to critique as well as apply the thinking of Barthes, Brown, Benjamin and others to a
variety of works, from novels to short stories, art installations to poems. In what sense might
a novelist render something legible? What kinds of things can poems accommodate? What
happens when we turn the stuff we’ve always talked about into subject matter?
The six-week series will focus mostly on modernist practice, though students will be
encouraged to present texts of their own choosing for discussion. What follows is a
provisional reading list; those who sign up for this course will be treated to more detailed
prescriptions and recommendations. Most texts are readily available, either to buy or to
borrow from the Faculty and University Libraries.
1. Tools
o Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899)
o John Dos Passos, selection from Occasions and Protest (1964)
o Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003)
2. Gifts
o Marianne Moore, selection from Complete Poems (1967)
o Ezra Pound, selection from The Cantos (1999)
o Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (2008)
3. Foodstuffs
o Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters (1960)
o Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (1964) and selection from The Collected Poems (1995)
o Roland Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’
(1961)
4. Thoughts
o Emily Dickinson, selection from The Emily Dickinson Archive (2014)
o T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’ (1919) and The Poems (2015)
o Steven Connor, ‘Thinking Things’ (2010)
5. Toys
o Stephen Crane, The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898)
o Dziga Vertov, Soviet Toys (1924)
1
o
Walter Benjamin, ‘Old Toys’, ‘Toys and Play’ and further essays from Selected
Writings (2005), vol. 2: part 1
6. Objets trouvés, objets d’art
o Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Other Short Works (1998)
o Joseph Cornell, selection of assemblage pieces
o Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004)
Edward Allen
[email protected]
2