Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
If he were not already well-established within the academic world (George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, co-editor of Critical Inquiry), Bill Brown’s 2003 and 2004 might begin to look like Jacques Derrida’s 1967. A Sense of Things comes equipped with jacket praise from Simon During of Johns Hopkins, Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University, Julia Stern of Northwestern University, and Michael Taussig of Columbia University. Not surprisingly, two of these individuals (in addition to Bill) appear in the edited volume Things, based on a Critical Inquiry special issue devoted to the topic. I bring up these interconnections for a reason: they remind me of Hamlet’s observation that “The King is a thing.” Indeed, I would argue that the King is the absent thing at work in this literary cabal, hidden by its very conspicuousness. Here is a list of universities represented by the Things volume: University of Chicago (3); Columbia (3); USC-Los Angeles (Daniel Tiffany); Stanford University (2); Mount St. Vincent University (Peter Schwenger); École des Mines (Bruno Latour); University of Pennsylvania; Smith; Princeton; MIT; University of Edinburgh; Brown; UC-San Diego (Lesley Stern); Yale.
Recommended Citation
Clinton, Alan "On Bill Brown's A Sense of Things and Things." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–4.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss2/12
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