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SoSe 21: PS-Introduction to Cultural Studies: Enchanted Objects

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Comments

In the twenty-first century we live in a world where it is no longer uncommon for our toasters to talk to our alarm clocks, for fridges to tell us when we are out of milk, and our phones to open our cars and start our engines. Our world is filled with objects that remember a history and that understand how they are being used. They are active participants in our world, ‘enchanted objects’ that inhere their own capacity to tell stories, to transform, to conjure and to invoke. Yet this idea of the talking object began well before the advent of the Internet of Things. In the eighteenth century, with the emergence of commodity cultures, a burgeoning literary marketplace, the vogue for collecting, and a newfound emphasis on cultures of sensibility, objects of everyday life were seen to inhere their own histories and affective meanings, thus challenging the boundaries between thought and thing, self and object. Taking a material culture studies approach to the world of things in the eighteenth century, this course will examine the ways in which various objects circulated within British society to accrue histories and lives of their own. Over the course of the semester, students will examine a range of eighteenth-century objects, such as the Toby Jug, the pineapple, the balloon and the carriage, before turning towards the highly popular It-narrative, in which coats, coins and pins recount their lives in the first person, in order to examine the extent to which the enchanted object can be seen to dislodge the human from centre stage in order to expose a world governed by nonhuman forces, and to what extent the agential object can be seen as a critique of newly emergent forms of consumer commodity capitalism.

Set Texts:

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to semester. close