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The Disruptive Power of Ordinary Things
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 40, Number 2, Winter 2017
- pp. 184-188
- 10.2979/jmodelite.40.2.11
- Review
- Additional Information
Maurizia Boscagli’s sophisticated and wide-ranging book explores the instability and the radical potential of everyday things (which she calls “stuff ”) in a culture of consumption and spectacle. Informed by and responding to the new materialism that has emerged across various disciplines, Stuff Theory strives to develop a new theoretical model to explain how we now live with and among things. Boscagli examines an array of examples from various media, time periods, cultures, national traditions, and aesthetic lineages, offering provocative readings of an intriguing group of works, and providing some useful new ways of thinking about the sheer strangeness and complexity — and even the liberating potential — of our daily interaction with material objects.