Thing theory

Thing theory

Thing theory is a branch of critical theory that focuses on the role of things in literature and culture. It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, whereby an object becomes a thing when it is somehow made to stand out against the backdrop of the world it exists in. Thing theorists look at the role of things within literature - at the fixation on particular objects. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on it in 2001.

Thing theory is particularly well suited to the study of modernism, due to the dictates of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, who declared that there should be "No ideas but in things" or T. S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative.


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