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Object Relations
University of Virginia, rf6d@virginia.edu
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We find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the midst of things; literary theorists are honing their awareness of everyday wares, mundane materials, ordinary stuff. Objects are no longer abject; matter really matters. "Things merely are" announces one recent title: another new book ponders "the ideas in things," a third, more mysteriously, "the tears of things." While this trend has been gathering momentum for some time, it received its imprimatur in the much noticed Critical Inquiry issue on "Things," edited by Bill Brown, who also went on to publish A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature.1 There is no single method, orientation, or approach underlying the various examples of what is now often known as "thing theory," just a widely shared sense that the object world has received short shrift in the last few decades, thanks to a linguistic turn that steered humanities scholars toward a single-minded concentration on