The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism - Hardcover

Jaffe, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816692017 ISBN 13: 9780816692019

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2014

Synopsis

Buffed up to a metallic shine; loose fitting, lopsided, or kludgy; getting in the way or getting lost; collapsing in an explosion of dust caught on the warehouse CCTV. Modern things are going their own ways, and this book attempts to follow them. A course of thought about their comings and goings and cascading side effects, The Way Things Go offers a thesis demonstrated via a century-long countdown of stuff. Modernist critical theory and aesthetic method, it argues, are bound up with the inhuman fate of things as novelty becoming waste.

Things are seldom at rest. Far more often they are going their own ways, entering and exiting our zones of attention, interest, and affection. Aaron Jaffe is concerned less with a humanist story of such things—offering anthropomorphizing narratives about recouping the items we use—as he is with the seemingly inscrutable, inhuman capacities of things for coarticulation and coherence. He examines the tension between this inscrutability on the one hand, and the ways things seem ready-made for understanding on the other hand, by means of exposition, thing-and-word-play, conceptual art, essayism, autopoesis, and prop comedy.

Among other novelties and detritus, The Way Things Go delves into books, can openers, roller skates, fat, felt, soap, joy buzzers, hobbyhorses, felt erasers, sleds, magic rabbits, and urinals. But it stands apart from the recent flood of thing-talk, rebuking the romantic tendencies caught up in the pathetic nature of debris defining the conversation. Jaffe demonstrates that literary criticism is the one mode of analysis that can unpack the many things that, at first glance, seem so nonliterary.

About this title

About the Author:

Aaron Jaffe is professor of English and director of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.

Review:

"A brilliant feat of cultural connecting: of cross-reading, from epistemology to objects and vice versa, and a perfect counterpoint to the lazy, sub-Buddhistic essentialism blighting so much contemporary thinking about things in general and things in particular."—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, Men in Space, and C

"A page-turner."—Leonardo Reviews

"Instead of a monograph, we are left with a refreshing hybrid of scholarship, speculative criticism, and reeling proclamation to which it will be a pleasure to return."—Critical Inquiry

"Quirky yet surprisingly gripping."—American Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0816692017
• ISBN 13: 9780816692019
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160