Words and the Murder of the Thing

Buttons: Life Writing from a Small Collection

“…In Peter Schwenger's (2001) discussion of the opposition of word and thing, he demonstrates how there is always 'an unknowable otherness to the thing,' even if it is named as object (101). If, as Schwenger asserts, 'there is a murder of the thing by the word,' still 'the word that replaces the thing is absence as much as presence' (113).…”

Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation

“…The verbalizing of the words written on the page seems to be authoring the scene. Yet the stasis of the image, the reluctance of the film to follow familiar modes of cinematic narrative development that give life in the form of visuals that correspond to the words articulated on the soundtrack, undermines the power of those signifiers to evoke a signified (Schwenger 2004). The voice-over merely intonates the words that appear on the screen in writing as an image of the page of Sebald's text.…”

Thinking things

“…54 Perhaps the most important thing about words, and especially words worked up into the specially inscrutable kinds of thing we call works of art, is not their capacity to impersonate objecthood or cloak themselves in mystery, but rather, as John Frow notes, their duality, or equivocality, the fact that 'works of art both are themselves things and may at the same time represent things'. 55 He might very well have put in, even and especially in representing themselves as things.…”