Sticky Realism: Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James

Through an exploration of the Jamesian grammar of furniture and how it reflects on the characteristic features of James's late texts, this article problematizes the reading of James that posits a chronologically progressive dematerialization in his aesthetic practice. The "details" of the Jamesian world symptomatize an increasing, and increasingly specific, imbrication of subject and object, idea and thing, in James's late-nineteenth-century apotheosis of realist representation.