The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism

(Paperback)

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The Way Things Go argues that modernist critical theory and aesthetic method are bound up with the inhuman fate of things as novelty becoming waste. Offering a thesis demonstrated via a century-long countdown of stuff, Aaron Jaffe demonstrates that literary criticism is the one mode of analysis that can unpack the many things that, at first glance, seem so nonliterary.

Reviews

"A brilliant feat of cultural connecting: of cross-reading, from epistemology to objects and vice versa, and a perfect counterpoint to the lazy, sub-Buddhistic essentialism blighting so much contemporary thinking about things in general and things in particular."Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder, Men in Space, and C

"A page-turner."Leonardo Reviews

"Instead of a monograph, we are left with a refreshing hybrid of scholarship, speculative criticism, and reeling proclamation to which it will be a pleasure to return."Critical Inquiry

"Quirky yet surprisingly gripping."American Literature

Author Bio

Aaron Jaffe is professor of English and director of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.