123044 PS Proseminar Literature / Literary Studies (2014W)

Sarah Nuttall calls it 'the entanglement of people and things', Bill Brown speaks about the 'spectral power' of objects, Tim Burke writes about the force of material things 'to possess and captivate us'. Recently, philosophers, anthropologists and literary theorists alike have re-examined the relation between humans and the 'inanimate' world. Increasingly, it has become clear that our daily interaction with things is not a question of mere consumption, passive use or exchange value; it always entails a deep psychic, affective and emotional investment. Although things are mute as far as their own existence is concerned, they can become very eloquent in telling tales about us, our desires, our anxieties and fantasies but also about wounds of the past which cannot easily be verbalised or ‘re-claimed’ through language. Is it possible, then, to speak about the unspeakable through the material? What is the narrative power of things? What kinds of functions do writers ascribe to the material world of their poems, novels and plays?

In this course we will familiarise ourselves with so-called 'thing-theory' (Jill Bennett's Vibrant Matter, Ian Hodder's Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things, and Bill Brown's A Sense of Things); we will explore the narrative function of objects in a wide range of contemporary South African texts: Damon Galgut's The Impostor, Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket, Athol Fugard's A Road to Mecca and poems by Ingrid de Kok.