| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. By Bill Brown. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xiv, 245 pp. Cloth, $32.00, isbn 0-226-07628-8. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-07629-6.)

Critical Inquiry coeditor Bill Brown subverts William Carlos Williams's modernist dictum, "'No ideas but in things,'" to ask "why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies" (p. 4). If Williams's decree aimed to grant "things" a metaphysical integrity impervious to the taint of what Karl Marx called the grotesque ideas of commodity fetishism, Brown rightly recognizes that cultural artifacts are neither autonomous entities nor repositories of false wants. Instead, they "pressure ... us to engage them as something other than mere surfaces" (p. 12)—a "something other," significantly, that, "however mediated by the advance of consumer culture," is "irreducible to that culture" (pp. 12–13). Freed from the determinism of most analyses of reification, his approach views materialism not as a Packardian machination perpetuated by hidden persuaders, but as a connotatively radiant force whose potential surplus of significance generates a reactionary anxiety in some (modernists such as Williams and T. S. Eliot) and a certain swaggered assurance in others (the consumer philosopher Simon Patten).

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