This thesis is a study of resonant things in Victorian writers’ houses/museums – a reading of those material objects that seem especially fit to presence the writer to whom they once belonged. Through the study of a selection of autographic objects in the houses/museums of Victorian writers, this thesis considers the following questions: What is resonance? How do things presence the absent individual with whom they are associated? Why do some categories of things – objects seemingly ‘imbued with a lasting sediment of their owners’ (Pascoe 3) – seem especially fit for the task of presencing, and how have we described or understood this phenomenon through narrative? Through a reading of things, categories of things, images, novels, life writing, cultural and critical theory and the house/museum space, this thesis will examine the relationship between presencing things, material metonymy, and remembrance. It will suggest that certain categories of things have qualities that allow them to serve as remembrancers, standing-in-for and eliciting a sense of the absent individual with whom they were once connected. Chapter one lays the ground for this reading of resonant things by contextualizing writers’ houses/museums as sites of literary pilgrimage and introducing and defining some of the key concepts and terms employed in this study such as autographic object, authenticity, contiguity and resonance. Chapter two moves inside the writer’s house/museum in order to demonstrate how things can ‘world’ via a reading of Marion Harland’s late nineteenth-century description of a tour of the Carlyle’s House alongside Martin Heidegger’s concept of worlding. Chapters three, four, five, and six look at different types of museum things, beginning with hair – the object most closely associated with the writer’s body – and then moving on to clothing, writerly tools such as desks and chairs, and ending with handwriting. Through assessing the particular qualities of each categorical thing alongside the concepts we meet these things with and the way that encounters with these things have been described in a variety of narratives, a number of the dynamics contributing to affective encounters with writerly things are uncovered. These dynamics or factors include: autographic ascription, authenticity, contiguity, metonymical fitness, equipmentality, and stasis/conspicuousness. Ultimately this thesis argues that certain things have a particular fitness for the task of evoking or presencing the absent individual for whom they stand, and that in doing so everyday objects undergo a metamorphosis: ceasing to be everyday tools fit for a specific task (for wearing, for sitting, for writing with) and becoming instead tools for remembrance – evocative things that presence both the absent individual with whom they are associated and the world they inhabited in their lifetime.

Critics of Edith Wharton frequently discuss the material culture that pervades her work, but the trend in doing so has been to rush past the things themselves and engage in abstracted conversations of theory. I would like to suggest that a closer scrutiny of the individual objects being presented in Wharton’s novels can highlight Wharton’s own theoretical approaches to material culture. Working from Bill Brown's distinction between objects and things, I want to argue that Wharton firmly situates the material culture in The Age of Innocence in the background of her characters' lives as objects which they utilize as extensions of the self; but she brings the thingness of material culture to the forefront in Twilight Sleep, where the material culture in the novel alternately stands out and malfunctions, as characters attempt—and fail—to construct coherent and livable identities for themselves in the face of a 1920s New York that Wharton depicts as a paradoxically over-furnished wasteland. I will ultimately argue that things, problematic as they are, become a matter of survival strategy for her characters in Twilight Sleep when they utilize them to reconstruct the social relations that have become increasingly threatened from the world of The Age of Innocence. / text

The gramophone's function in literature has generally been examined in relation to media studies and Walter Benjamin's discussion of the reproduction of art through mechanical means, emphasizing the gramophone’s playback of recorded materials. This particular methodology, however, only deals with half of the machine's potential. My project mediates the links between media studies and “thing theory.” By making a distinction between the gramophone as an instrument (through which we access or hear a recording) and the gramophone as a "thing" (an object which draws attention to itself by not behaving as expected, thereby forcing us to confront the object's irreducibility), I trace connections between the physical “thing” as well as its embedded or recorded cultural archives of history, trauma, and identity for Modernist authors and their contemporary audiences. As both a voiced and mute object, the gramophone amplifies embedded accounts of a culture frequently traumatized through violence and disruption; it also bears physical testimony to the scars left behind by those traumatic encounters. My project takes Irish Modernism as its primary focus, and it identifies ways in which the traumas represented by phonograph and gramophone are tied to cultural traumas specific to Ireland. Again to briefly quantify, in my work I discuss (to varying degrees) over 20 Irish texts that evoke the gramophone as an object of some significance and in relation to some aspect of cultural trauma. For instance, in Dracula, the oral traditional of Ireland is under attack by the undead oralities of the phonograph: a machine that presumably preserves living oral culture, is essentially killing what it attempts to preserve. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the gramophone is feminized in the context of gendered colonial politics. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock the machine is imbued with the physical and psychological violence of Ireland at war. And in works like Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island the gramophone is a manifestation of post-war tensions—both psychological and political—that can erupt in violence when left unresolved.

Né en 1812 et mort en 1870, Charles Dickens assiste tout au long du XIXe siècle au développement de l’ère industrielle, de la société de consommation et de nouvelles pratiques de lecture qui transforment les usages du document. Ce sont ces nouveaux usages que Dickens commente continuellement dans ses romans ainsi que dans ses essais, en ne cessant d’en exposer toute l’ambivalence. Le romancier manifeste une inquiétude permanente quant au pouvoir de l’instance auctoriale qui n’est jamais pris pour acquis. Ce travail s’inscrit donc dans une réflexion sur le lecteur et la réception tels qu’ils se présentent dans les textes dickensiens. Le personnage dickensien est présenté comme un lecteur concret et un herméneute imparfait. Sa réception des textes écrits dépend de sa subjectivité d’une part, et d’autre part de la matérialité du support qui s’interpose entre lui et le texte. Ainsi, le sens construit ultérieurement par les lecteurs dickensiens peut se distinguer de l’intention originelle de l’auteur : contrairement à l’oral, l’écrit s’inscrit dans une communication différée et crée un écart dans lequel la subjectivité et la matérialité s’insère. En considérant ces deux paramètres dans le processus de la communication écrite, ce travail adopte les perspectives d’étude de ce que la critique anglo-saxonne nomme Book History. L’analyse de l’objet textuel qu’est le document rejoint également les constructions théoriques du courant Thing Theory. Dans la continuité de ces courants, nous nous intéresserons à “l’imagination matérielle” de l’œuvre dickensienne qui pense, rêve et vit dans la matière du document. Il s’agira de voir pourquoi et comment Dickens cherche paradoxalement à se défaire des matières inertes que sont le papier, la plaque et la pierre comme supports de l’écriture, pour ensuite examiner son rêve de textes vivants qui trouvent leur possibilité en l’homme, dans un au-delà de la matière. / From his birth in 1812 until his death in 1870, Charles Dickens was part of the industrial development era of the 19th century which brought about the consumer society and new forms of reading that transformed the use of documents. Dickens comments on these different forms and uses throughout his work, both in his novels and in his essays, in which he demonstrates a persistent uncertainty concerning the power of the author. This dissertation aims at reflecting on the role of the reader and the act of reading as they are presented in Dickens’s novels. Dickens’s characters are presented as concrete readers who imperfectly interpret the various texts they are presented with. The reception of written texts is subject on the one hand to the character’s subjectivity and on the other hand the materiality of the document which comes between the reader and the text. Thus whatever sense is construed by a Dickensien reader can differ from the original intent of the text’s author. Contrary to an orally delivered message, a written text is part of a differed communication into which subjectivity and matter irrupt. Considering these two parameters within the process of written communication, this work adopts the perspectives of the Anglo-Saxon critical study called Book History. The analysis of the textual object which is the document is connected with the theoretical reflections on objects as considered in Thing Theory. Together with these theories, this work is interested in “the material imagination” in Dickens’s work which thinks and dreams about the materiality of the document. We set out to understand why and how Dickens paradoxically attempts to deconstruct inert materials such as paper, signboards, stones as media for writing to then examine his dream of living texts which find its answer in man, beyond matter.

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This thesis aims to analyse dress in Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, both in its independent being and in its relation to the characters of the novel. Thing theory is the main methodology of use, with the support of the Heideggerian concept of ‘world’. Together they open up for a treatise into the ontology of dress: what clothes exist like, as an object fixed in time, and how clothes are encountered, as a thing manifested through time. Via the novel’s protagonist, we follow how things, but also being itself, are dependent on how she perceives time. The thesis ends with a short inquiry into the potential relations between body and dress.

H.D.'s autobiographical novel HERmione is phenomenological in texture. It portrays both sides of a dynamic process: the individual "creates" the world by adjusting a "psychic lens," projecting a mental space in which objects can appear; yet at the same time, the world imposes itself on the sensing subject. The framework within which this dynamic process occurs is the body; as the novel portrays, the body is the site of juxtapositions and transformations as it comes into contact with the world. In this article, I discuss the ways in which H.D. explores the boundaries and intersections between the human body and the world around it. I will draw on several influential feminist critiques of the novel, exploring how these critiques illuminate the social and sexual forces at work behind Hermione's experiences, and I will in turn introduce phenomenological theory to expand upon the prevailing critical view of the novel. I assert that Hermione's body is both the setting and the subject of HERmione. Even as she is objectified by both specific individuals and by the social forces at work in her world, her body reacts in unique ways to counteract this tendency. Her body transforms, and her perceptions blur the lines between subject and object, person and thing. As Hermione begins to develop an understanding of the way she encounters the world, she also develops the ability to act within it. Her body becomes prosthetic, encompassing otherness and ultimately allowing her to move beyond the relationships and expectations which threaten to confine her in a solely "decorative" life.

Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that “the thing names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” This article examines the subject-object relation between African things and African bodies in Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus. While the main character, Kambili, eventually learns to assimilate Western Catholicism into her Nigerian reality, her Christian fundamentalist father, Eugene, uses Catholicism to justify his self-hating destruction of African things and bodies. This article argues that both reactions are rooted in the characters' ability or inability to see African material things, including both objects and bodies, as autonomous subjects. Adichie's novel demonstrates that religious syncretism centered in an ethics of things is a viable, fruitful reaction to the colonizers' religion, and that religious practice can be healthily enacted through the medium of things and bodies.

The intent of this thesis is to clarify my artistic working process as well as the resulting thesis exhibition, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I will provide explanations and descriptions of my exhibition (comprising a select placement of objects) as well as offer antecedents, informants, and the evolution of my art practice as a whole during my graduate studies. Specifically the work is discussed through the lenses of situational aesthetics, conceptual relationships, and perceptual absence to argue for the complicated semantics of the viewer within an ontology of object-hood and pre-established conditions.

La critique de la romancière américaine Amy Tan se concentre principalement sur la dimension humaine de ses romans, négligeant la dimension matérielle de l’existence qui occupe une place prépondérante dans ses romans. Sous l’influence d’une conception anthropocentrique qui privilégie l’être humain ou le sujet, la critique s’est concentrée essentiellement sur la relation mère / fille, sur l’importance du langage et de la mémoire et sur les conflits entre les cultures chinoise et américaine. Néanmoins, dans le contexte de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le “retour aux choses” et l’accent nouveau mis sur le “non humain”, mouvement qui s’est mis en place dans la critique des années 1990, je porte mon attention sur les choses, plus particulièrement sur les interactions entre humains et non-humains dans ses romans. Sous la double influence des cultures chinoise et américaine, Tan dépasse l’opposition binaire, qui caractérise la tradition occidentale, selon laquelle le sujet est supérieur à l’objet. Les humains et les non-humains ainsi que les entités naturelles et spirituelles sont tous des choses-Qi dans l’univers textuel. En mettant en dialogue la réflexion occidentale contemporaine sur les choses avec les philosophies chinoises, notamment le taoïsme, cette thèse examine les caractéristiques des choses-Qi et leurs interactions de nature à provoquer un retour écologique à l’harmonie entre les humains et les non-humains, entre le microcosme et le macrocosme dans l’ordre textuel. / Comments on Amy Tan's novels mainly focus on what we associate with human culture, ignoring the material dimensions of existence that figure prominently in her novels. Influenced by the anthropocentric idea that the human being/the subject is superior to things/the object, critics mainly focus on the mother-daughter relation, the importance of language and memory and the conflicts of Chinese and American culture. However, in the context of the so-called “return to things,” “back to things,” and “turn to the non-human” which has become visible in the humanities since the 1990s, I concentrate on things, specifically on the interactions between humans and nonhumans in her novels. Under the influence of both American and Chinese culture, Tan breaks with the western tradition of binary opposition in which the subject is superior to the object. Qi-things include natural and man-made things, human beings, and even spiritual things and things in the textual world. Bringing the twenty-first century western revision of things into dialogue with Chinese philosophies, especially Taoism, this dissertation discusses the traits of Qi-things and how they interact with each other to foster an ecological return to harmony within the textual world that reconciles humans and non-humans, microcosm and macrocosm.