MARC Record from Library of Congress

LEADER: 05015cam a2200385 i 4500
001 2013045861
003 DLC
005 20150107081202.0
008 131223s2014 nyu b 001 0 eng
010 $a 2013045861
020 $a9781623562687 (hardback)
020 $a9781623562250 (paperback)
040 $aDLC$beng$cDLC$erda$dDLC
042 $apcc
050 00 $aPN56.M35$bB67 2014
082 00 $a801$223
084 $aLIT006000$aPHI013000$2bisacsh
100 1 $aBoscagli, Maurizia,$eauthor.
245 10 $aStuff theory :$beveryday objects, radical materialism /$cMaurizia Boscagli.
264 1 $aNew York :$bBloomsbury,$c2014.
300 $a279 pages ;$c23 cm
336 $atext$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$2rdamedia
338 $avolume$2rdacarrier
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520 $a"Stuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and thus is the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique.Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home de;cor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object.Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built"--$cProvided by publisher.
520 $a"Stuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and thus is the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home decor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes"--$cProvided by publisher.
505 8 $aMachine generated contents note: -- Introduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes--Matter in the Moment 1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter 2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault 3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution 4. "You Must Remember this:" Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory 5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff Notes Index.
650 0 $aMaterial culture in literature.
650 0 $aPersonal belongings in literature.
650 0 $aPersonal belongings in art.
650 0 $aProperty in literature.
650 7 $aLITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.$2bisacsh
650 7 $aPHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics.$2bisacsh
856 42 $3Cover image$uhttp://www.netread.com/jcusers2/bk1388/687/9781623562687/image/lgcover.9781623562687.jpg