Published Paper Details:

The fascination of contemporary world for materialism has opened up plethora of opportunities for the modern day critics to explore our love for material things and its representation in literature. The name of the author Bill Brown stands tall in this respect. His seminal essay “Thing Theory” in the special issue of Critical Inquiry (2001) has spurred a new fascination to examine things themselves “before ideas, before theory, before the word” (2001).His further fascinating study in “A Sense Of Things” explores the roots of modern America’s preoccupation with things and the problems that objects posed for American literature especially at the end of the last century. This was the time when the production and consumption of things took the shape of defining national culture itself. Bill Brown’s study emphasized the role of objects, shaped by human beings, in shaping the human subjects .It studies, how things, instead of being a solution to the problems, became problems in their own right. In a way, Bill Brown’s Thing Theory tries to prove that the present generation not only possesses the material things but also is possessed by them. This sounds so true when we notice that how all our obsessive efforts to possess accumulate and keep things throws flood of light on the strange fact that things play a great role in shaping our self-worth. In a way Bill Brown’s study offers a new way to think about the concept of materialism and has paved the way to the development of the Thing Theory. Today it has become important part in the ever growing corpus on objects and things.