What are “Things” Saying in Renaissance Studies?

Abstract

This essay takes up the recent turn to “things” in Renaissance literary studies and attempts to adjudicate the kinds of advances this turn might offer beyond the New Historicist project of the 1980s and 1990s. Offering thumbnail sketches of key contributions by variously Marxist or materialist critics and also by the eclectic group of approaches that name themselves “historical phenomenology,” it argues that the new volubility of “things” in our discipline augurs a return to the urgent theoretical questions of the early 1980s on the interrelation between form and history. In order to keep this field of possibilities open to further experimentation, the essay concludes by introducing readers to two theorists whose work shapes the current conversation, anthropologist William Pietz and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, and suggests some ways in which their work might further be used by literary critics and historians.

Memory | Materiality | Sensuality

“…The mnemonic objects of study in this special issue of Memory Studies are wide reaching—they range from the border walls of neoliberal states to the pitted leather of worn jackets, panoramic postcards, soldier-shaped cookies, dry-roasted peanuts, built memorials, museum displays, and much more. The things studied here are part of an “eccentric archive” that has emerged indiscriminately, based on the individual proclivities and research interests of the authors involved (Cvetkovich, 159–160) because, as Julian Yates (2006) points out, “every ‘thing’ offers a route through the world” (p. 1006). What cuts across these papers is the attention paid to the mnemonic assemblages that emerge from a material reading of the things of history, memory, and culture.…”

Can the plant speak? Giving tobacco the voice it deserves

“…-creates products which are regularly used to create hybrids that I call 'tobacco-persons'. Yates (2006Yates ( : 1007, writing of a different plant product as it was used around the time that tobacco came onto the European scene, talks of 'orange-persons', those who give themselves over 'to the principle of connection that is "orange"'. I would like to make a similar play for tobacco-persons, to be superseded, perhaps, by the more recent (and equally contentious) manifestation of e-cigarette users as a type of 'nicotine-person'.…”