Big Think Interview With Bill Brown | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Bill Brown

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A conversation with the professor of English and visual arts at the University of Chicago.

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Bill Brown:

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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TRANSCRIPT:

Bill Brown: rnBill Brown and I’m a professor of English and visual arts at thernUniversity of Chicago.

Question: When did you first know that you wanted to studyrnliterature professionally?

Bill Brown: Irnthink I probably recognized that I was going to be something like a literaryrncritic when I started to be conscious of the fact that I read very slowly, yournknow? Which is really to say thatrnif I'm reading narrative prose fiction, I tend to read it more like poetry, sornI read a sentence and think about a sentence. And which is, I have to tell you, a huge handicap if you endrnup being a literary critic, because you have to read lots and lots. But I think it was probably that, arncertain sense of being interested in the lines of prose that made me thinkrnthat, you know, there was really something to explore, whether it had to dornwith the rhythm, the symbolism, the tropology, something along thosernlines. And I also have to say thatrnI imagine even when I was a kid I was pretty convinced I would be an Englishrnteacher.

Question: On which areas of literature are you currentlyrnfocused?

Bill Brown: rnMostly I work on 19th and 20th century American literature. Sometimes I do English literature, Irnhave an essay on Virginia Woolf, for instance. Sometimes a little bit of French literature andrnincreasingly, I also attend to the visual arts.

Question: What does your everyday work as a critic consistrnof?

Bill Brown: I think it's trying to explain how, both whatrnand how a given text, either discursive or visual, means and by the, what itrnmeans and the how it means, I could very well be asking questions that arerneventually going to be historically grounded, or with a historical context,rnwhich makes a given poem make sense, right? Or geographical context, how is it that this should, yournknow, German artist in 1950 was using these materials, that, you know, happenedrnto be outside of Berlin, that kind of thing.

And I would say, a lot of it would relate to the very idearnof slowing down. That is, I thinkrnif you read something, something famous, say The Great Gatsby, well, it's notrnhard to understand, you know? It'srnnot complicated, it's not like a tough poem, but I think in fact if you slowrndown and you start to see what it is that Fitzgerald is doing, constructingrncertain metaphors and deploying and redeploying certain themes as you gornthrough that book, that's how, I think, you realize that in, you know,rn100-and-some pages, a very, very short novel, you feel as though you've had arnvery, very big experience.

Question: What is thing theory?

Bill Brown: rnSure. I think it, I'mrnwilling to define thing theory but only in the broadest terms. That is, I would say that the workrnbeing done that I would constellate under the rubric thing theory is addressingrnhow it is that the inanimate object world helps to form and transform humanrnbeings alike. So part of that isrnto say, how does our material environment shape us? Part of that is also to talk about the production of value,rneconomic value, in Marxist terms, but also various kinds of symbolicrnvalue. So that, I think, mostrngenerally. And I think forrndifferent scholars working in different fields, and there are lots of differentrnfields in which one might say thing theorists are working, science studies,rnarcheology, anthropology, literary studies, art history, history, now, theyrneach particular concerns and I think particular ways of understanding thernpresence and power and meaning of objects, ...

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