Raphaela Knipp

Narrative der Dinge

AbstractCultural and social studies have recently followed the »material turn« due to which objects and technical artifacts have reached new epistemological importance. Based on Bruno Latour’s concept of a symmetrical anthropology which regards human and nonhuman entities as equally important social actors the difference between the social and the material world gets less and less distinct. Both worlds therefore seem to intermingle with each other and new questions regarding their differences need to be asked. The following essay goes along with this discourse from the perspective of the literary studies. It explains the proposition that Literature is a means of reflection on this kind of development. Literature has always been telling the interdependence between the social and the material world and has shaped human-object-relation with all its different aspects. Against the traditional view of the literary studies which emphasize that things in literary texts are only requisites and symbols, this new perspective opens up the possibility to view things in Literature completely different which can be connected with Latour’s notion of the actant. In order to do that some narratives of objects will be introduced: the circulating object, the deceitful object and the telling object. Furthermore, the short story »Objects« written by José Saramago and the novel The Mezzanine written by Nicholson Baker will be discussed, as Saramago and Baker have their own mode to report about human-object-relations.