Learning Outcomes:
On completion of this module, students should be able to: - analyze and engage in critical discussion of the nature and status of the object in postwar French culture; - analyze and discuss the set texts in relation to their medium of expression and in relation to the problematic of the object; - relate the set texts to a broader historical and intellectual context.
Indicative Module Content:
Set Works:
Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses (1942)
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Les Gommes (1953)
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Georges Perec, Les Choses: histoire des années soixante (1965)
Simone de Beauvoir, Les Belles Images (1966)
Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objets (1968)
Indicative General Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).
Baudrillard, Jean, Le Système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
Brown, Bill, ‘Thing Theory’, in Critical Inquiry, 28: 1 (2001), 1–22.
Connor, Steven, ‘Thinking Things’, in Textual Practice, 24: 1 (2010), 1–20.
Latour, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
____________, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 14–41.
____________, Petites leçons de sociologie des sciences (1993; Paris: La Découverte, 2006)
Marx, Karl, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (1972; New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 319–29.
Pietz, William, ‘The Problem of the Fetish I’, in Res, 9 (1985), 5–17.
______________, ‘The Problem of the Fetish II’, in Res, 13 (1987), 23–47.
______________, ‘The Problem of the Fetish IIIa’, in Res, 16 (1988), 105–23.
Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Sheringham, Michael, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 248–91.