The subject of the workshop
is inspired by ideas put forward by Arjun Appadurai, who suggests exploring the
ways in which “things-in-motion (...) illuminate their human and social
context” (The Social Life of Things, 1986) and by Bill Brown, the author of thing theory, who postulates the
analysis of the tyranny of things over humans (A Sense of Things, 2003).
The consideration of the literary representation of things in the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century British literature is particularly justified by the fact
that the two centuries witness the industrial revolution and its “necessary
analogue” the consumer revolution as a result of which which things/objects
begin to play an increasingly significant role in British society. The subjects
which may be explored include the way literature represents diverse
relationships between humans and objects, the distinction between objects (which
are entangled in human relations) and things (which are ontologically independent),
the material and ideal aspects of things, and many others.
[More in WLM 3rd.]
