What does literature have to do with things? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, which is one reason I want to teach this course. I do know, however, that literature necessarily makes use of objects. There’s a famous scarlet letter, a golden bowl, a lighthouse, a cookie (well, a French madeleine) and many other objects (famous or not) that populate poems, novels, and appear as props in plays. Understanding how literature re-presents (that is, makes figuratively present what is literally absent) the world of things is to understand the trickiness of texts and the profound claims that literature makes on us as readers. When we read, “He pulled out a gun,” we believe in some mysterious way that there really is a gun somewhere, rather than just a bunch of words on a page. How literature makes use of objects, that is, what the objectives of literature are or can be, will be a continual source of discussion and controversy for us. This course will consider the ways in which literature constructs, represents, and produces the facsimile of our world of objects. We have a number of ways to think of the things that surround us—as commodities, as gifts, or treasures, or as fetishes, and writers are always faced the problem of how to translate the material world into the verbal marks on the page (like what you’re reading right now) that stand in for that materiality. Sometimes literature has itself strived to reach the status of a “thing” or “object” (and certainly a commodity!). Throughout the quarter we will put a number of literary texts (Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature, Lisa See’s Snow Lotus and the Secret Fan, etc.) into conversation with several theoretical takes on objects (Marx on the commodity form, Freud on the fetish, Lewis Hyde on the gift, Bill Brown on the thing). Assignments will include short writing assignments and a longer final project.