“Things” and Recovery From Trauma in Joukhader’s A Map of Salt and Stars

The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in Syrian American author Jennifer Zeynab Joukhader’s novel A Map of Salt and Stars (2018). It highlights the role of certain “Things” in Nour’s family’s healing process from the traumatic experiences of the Syrian war. The article also sheds light on the war’s reshaping of the objects and the individuals’ relationship with them. The objects that this article investigates are as varied as mundane utensils (a shattered plate), cherished souvenirs (Zahra’s bracelet), and even magical objects (Nour’s stone). Particularly, the article examines the establishment of the close association between the characters and these objects and the impact of this association on the family’s journey towards safety and recovery. For this reason, the present study is situated within the theoretical frameworks of the “Thing” theory and psychological trauma. This article argues that the close association that the characters establish with certain “Things” accompanies them during their grief and traumatic experiences, and subsequently initiates and facilitates their recovery.

Dematerializing Digital Objects: Denial, Decay, Detritus and Other Matters of Fact

We know little about the materials that constitute the digital devices we use every day, from where those materials are derived, or where they will go when we discard them. Through a variety of means, digital devices are “dematerialized.” That is, a digital object’s material components are denied and concealed by complex cultural and economic practices that support a myth of immaterial and ubiquitous computing without material consequences. Since the early days of digital computing, designers have striven to design devices that are smaller, better, denser, and faster. These traits are framed as ideals against which new products are measured and they have encouraged a desire for ubiquitous, imperceptible integration of digital computing at all levels of modern life. This dissertation argues that the digital object is dematerialized and that this pervasive reduction of the physical object and our very awareness of the physicality of digital materials inhibits our ability to support awareness of the material limits and often detrimental impacts of digital devices. However, the material nature of the digital object may be more apparent after an object is rendered obsolete. Drawing from media archaeology, thing theory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines a few “afterlives” of digital objects because it is only after its useful life that the object’s materiality takes on transformative powers. For example, when discarded, its physical properties become problematic and may be framed as an environmental issue. Or, when treated as a material artifact in a museum the digital object resists historicity, and when saved as a memento it may take on unexpected nostalgic power. I argue that it is precisely the dematerialized aspects of the informatic media that have created the situation of ‘e-waste’ and it is through a new consciousness of their materiality that we might think about how these technologies evolve and occupy space in the future.

Dematerializing Digital Objects: Denial, Decay, Detritus and Other Matters of Fact

We know little about the materials that constitute the digital devices we use every day, from where those materials are derived, or where they will go when we discard them. Through a variety of means, digital devices are “dematerialized.” That is, a digital object’s material components are denied and concealed by complex cultural and economic practices that support a myth of immaterial and ubiquitous computing without material consequences. Since the early days of digital computing, designers have striven to design devices that are smaller, better, denser, and faster. These traits are framed as ideals against which new products are measured and they have encouraged a desire for ubiquitous, imperceptible integration of digital computing at all levels of modern life. This dissertation argues that the digital object is dematerialized and that this pervasive reduction of the physical object and our very awareness of the physicality of digital materials inhibits our ability to support awareness of the material limits and often detrimental impacts of digital devices. However, the material nature of the digital object may be more apparent after an object is rendered obsolete. Drawing from media archaeology, thing theory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines a few “afterlives” of digital objects because it is only after its useful life that the object’s materiality takes on transformative powers. For example, when discarded, its physical properties become problematic and may be framed as an environmental issue. Or, when treated as a material artifact in a museum the digital object resists historicity, and when saved as a memento it may take on unexpected nostalgic power. I argue that it is precisely the dematerialized aspects of the informatic media that have created the situation of ‘e-waste’ and it is through a new consciousness of their materiality that we might think about how these technologies evolve and occupy space in the future.

Commerce and Consumers: The Ubiquitous Chest of the Late Middle Ages

Contrary to their ubiquity within written, visual, and material sources, chests have largely remained overlooked in studies of the late Middle Ages. Bill Brown’s “thing theory” helps to explicate the ways in which chests can transform from unnoticed “things” in the background to meaningful “objects” when viewed through their entanglements with commercial, consumer, political, and moral concerns. The interdisciplinary study of chests in the late Middle Ages brings together a range of evidence including inventories, guild accounts, court pleas, contemporary writings, images, and material culture from Burgundy, France, and England.

Buttons: Life Writing from a Small Collection

This essay explores the role of everyday objects in life writing, using the example of a collection of buttons. Writing as bricoleur, and influenced by thing theory, I follow a digressive path and wonder how key aspects of life writing, such as memory, the body, and identity, are influenced when one writes from and with objects.

Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur

This chapter—which is informed by cultural geographers’ concern for ‘recuperating the spatial practices’ that may be detected within literary texts—discusses an architecture of ‘situated objects’ across literary texts that were produced as part of the Victorian Arthurian revival. It investigates the extent to which Arthurian objects are exoticized and rendered part of fantastical (and actual) landscapes (taking issue with ‘thing theory’). It also considers how in some Arthurian literary reworkings, the Arthurian artefact may not obviously return at all, or be recycled as `ordinary’, in a more familiar, domesticized setting. The chapter argues that Victorian Arthurian texts become an assemblage of codified objects, with those objects referencing and reinterpreting earlier sources of the Arthurian legend, whilst also pointing to complex social change and material cultural encounters.

Objects

In the early 1930s, Mandelstam wrote a set of short poems about objects. These lyrics, read here from the perspective of modern thing-theory as well as early Soviet writings on ‘the thing’, occasion meditations on questions of aesthetics: What is the difference between a thing and an object? How much work should the viewer be expected to do to recover the original intention of the craftsman? Does social utility spoil beauty? These questions impinge on the value of found things like stones used by Mandelstam as metaphors for the kind of beautiful object that might look found rather than made, that is, anonymous and formally perfect. Should texts be written this way? Would that solve the problem of uncontrollable thought? The chapter concludes with a discussion of lyrics that, as pure poems, seek to operate according to an independent musical language. Can they remain aloof from the world and poetic biography?

Thing Theory

Thing theory names an approach that scholars use to investigate human-object relations in art, literature, culture, and everyday life. Though commonly thought of as a way to study physical artifacts, thing theory is rather a means to explore the dynamics between human subjects and inanimate objects. Thing theory emerges from the scholarly concern with commodity capitalism, and therefore has many antecedents in anthropology, art history, and museum studies. But it more precisely names the theoretical framework that developed within English departments in the 1990s, and prompted literary studies to turn upon the object matter of literature. The phrase “thing theory” came widely into use in 2001, in Bill Brown’s introduction to a special issue of Critical Inquiry titled Things. There, Brown describes the questions that thing theory raises as queries not into objects alone, but into subject-object relations in particular spaces, at particular times. Literature was central to these queries, not only because English departments in the 1990s were home to the “high theory” that Brown draws upon, but because, as he argues, it is a privileged medium for revealing the force of inanimate objects in human experience. In other words, literature makes the “thingness” of objects visible. This distinction comes from Heidegger, for whom objects become things when they can no longer serve their common or intended function. When an object breaks or is misused, it sheds its conventional role and becomes visible in new ways: it becomes a thing. Thing theory draws upon this notion of productive estrangement to consider the meaning that physical artifacts can have for human subjects. While thing theory entails discussions of “real” artifacts, it has primarily been used by scholars in the humanities to discuss the representation of such things in art and literature—specifically as a means to understand what meaning such representations hold. Around 2010, a number of books about the agency of objects by philosophers, political scientists, and media studies scholars inaugurated what might be called a second phase of thing theory. This second phase entailed scholars seeking to decenter the human subject in their materialist studies. These “new materialisms” are less confined to representational forms and have expanded the reach of thing theory well beyond literary studies. The new materialisms—some of which build directly on an older Marxist tradition of historical materialism—and other branches of thought that attempt to decenter the human, including object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, draw upon thing theory but might best be thought of as a set of allied approaches interested in the agency of things. This bibliography tracks the initial phase of thing theory in literary studies, consolidates the earlier scholarship it draws on most consistently, outlines the second phase of thing theory across a variety of fields, and looks to work that has inaugurated new, future directions.

Apostrophe

Apostrophe is a rhetorical figure that is most commonly found (and thought of) in lyric poetry. It also occurs in other literary and cultural forms—memoir, prose fiction, song, theater, and cinema. Derived from the Greek prefix “apo” (away from) and “strophe” (turn or twist), the word “apostrophe” is often confused with a punctuation mark, a single inverted comma used in English to denote a possessive (as in “ the Queen’s English” or “the cat’s whiskers”). In this context, an apostrophe stands in for something absent. Anglo-Saxon, a heavily inflected language and the basis for modern English, had a genitive case where nouns used in a possessive way tended to end in “es” (“cyninges” was the Anglo-Saxon for “King’s”). This more common sense of the word “apostrophe” denotes, therefore, a punctuation mark that stands in for an elided letter “e” or vowel sound. In the context of rhetoric and poetry “apostrophe” has come to denote what occurs when a writer or speaker addresses a person or entity who is dead, absent, or inanimate to start with. The figure is described by Cicero and Quintillian. The former described it as a “figure that expresses grief or indignation.” Quintillian emphasized its capacity to be “wonderfully stirring” for an audience. For both rhetoricians, apostrophe was something that occurred in a public context, usually a debate or trial, and was part of the arsenal of political rhetoric. Apostrophe has therefore a double valence beyond the common understanding as a punctuation mark that stands in for a missing possessive “e.” It denotes what occurs when a speaker turns from addressing her audience to addressing another figure or entity, one who may or may not be present, alive, or even animate. And it has also come to denote that very process of addressing the absent, the dead, and the inanimate. The figure occurs in medieval rhetoric and poetry, in Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, and has come to be identified with lyric poetry itself, especially through the work and legacy of the literary theorist Paul de Man. For him, a poem describing a set of circumstances has less claim to the status of lyric poetry than a poem apostrophizing aspects of those circumstances. In part as a result of de Man’s influence, apostrophe has come to be connected with different forms of complicated affect—most notably grief, embarrassment, and any number of ways in which human life can be seen or experienced as vulnerable, open to question, or imbued with potential. It has also been used to explore complicated legal and ethical terrains where the boundary between the living and the dead, the present and the absent, the animate and the inanimate can be difficult to draw or ascertain. Two areas of contemporary criticism and thought for which the employment of the figure is most resonant are therefore eco-criticism and “thing theory” (most notably the work of Jane Bennett). The possibilities of apostrophe continue to be regularly employed in political rhetoric, song, poetry, theater, fiction, and cinema.