A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

Rating:
Summary: Multiple jouis-sense
Review: A delightful and wonderfully oblique reading of America's fascination with things and objects, Bill Brown's *A Sense of Things* inspires the reader to think twice about the ways in which American literature structures one's knowledge via a negotiation with the inanimate, the commodity, the artifact: in short things that should be stable but are always in excess of themselves. Readings on James, Jewett, Twain, and Norris prove just how much a committed historical/material literary analysis may accomplish. Definitely worth the labor of reading for its deferred critical pleasures. A slim but dense book, a little object itself, that gratifies.