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Bill Brown
Professor of English & Visual Arts at the University of Chicago
Bill Brown is Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of English and the visual arts at the University of Chicago. His past research has focused on popular literary genres, recreational forms, and the ways that mass-cultural phenomena impress themselves on the literary imagination. He currently studies the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures. His major theoretical work is in "thing theory," which borrows from Heidegger's object/thing distinction to look the role of objects that have become manifest in a way that sets them apart from the world in which they exist. He edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry on this subject, which won awards for best special issue of an academic journal in 2001. His books include "A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature" (2003).
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2 min
The creator of “thing theory” suspects his professional curiosity about objects stems from his private inability to attach much importance to them.
5 min
The UChicago critic names the works he loved best as a young reader and the author that excites him most these days.
10 min
Is the nature of “the text” changing in the Web age? Are blogs hurting criticism? And could the growing interest in “thing theory” be a response to an increasingly virtual […]
1 min
The term “thing theory” is a joke, but not a joke about physics.
3 min
By inviting us to pay close attention to the object itself, “thing theory” can tease out new meaning in the simplest artwork—even an apparent prank like Duchamp’s “Fountain.”
5 min
Many modern artists have explored the idea that the material world “might want to be organized other than the way we’ve organized it.”
7 min
From Daisy weeping into Gatsby’s shirts to Tom Hanks chatting with Wilson the volleyball, stories are as much about things as people.