Overview

The ever-growing interest in the analysis of materiality has found its expression in many studies of objects and objecthood, of things and “thingness”. Combining cultural, phenomenological, semiotic, and philosophical approaches, this collection of eleven essays proposes a journey into “the silent life of things”, into those aspects of materiality that are not immediately visible and require both increased attention and a sense of intuition. It focuses on the subtle changes that materiality operates upon our subjectivity and upon our status as producers, users, possessors, negotiators and manipulators of objects, and analyses the ways in which materiality is constantly redefined by consumerism and the strategies it adopts in order to resist commodification. In the process, the collection explores different ways of deciphering what materiality, in its reliable concreteness or its “magical materialism”, tries to tell us: all the silent stories that “things” accumulate while circulating among people, societies and cultures; the narratives they weave when amassed, collected, archived or transformed into cultural commodities; the secrets they reveal when witnessing the gradual commodification of their owners – of their bodies, lives and souls. The Silent Life of Things: Representing and Reading Commodified Objecthood establishes a new paradigm for reading and interpreting commodified materiality, and its participation in the establishment of a new aesthetics of consumerism.

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9781443883689

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Daniela Rogobete is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of British, American and German Studies, University of Craiova, Romania. Her publications include When Texts Come into Play–Intertexts and Intertextuality (2003), Metaphor – Between Language and Thought (2008), and Deconstructing Silence – Ambiguity and Censored Metaphors in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (2010). Jonathan P. A. Sell lectures in English at the University of Alcalá, Spain. He is the author of Rhetoric and Wonder in English Renaissance Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (2006), Allusion, Identity and Community in Recent British Writing (2010) and Conocer a Shakespeare (2012), and the editor of Metaphor and Diaspora in Recent Writing (2012). Alan Munton is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, UK. He has worked extensively on the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis and also published on Will Self, Picasso’s reception in Britain, the Spanish Civil War, contemporary poetry, the process of quotation, and jazz. He is currently preparing a book on Lewis.

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