We Are Full of (Literary) Things

Thingful Fabrication, Narrative Embalming, and Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian)

Abstract

Literature is full of things—autonomous, historical things which speak in their own language of thingness. This thing theory essay by Alex Prong demonstrates how literary things afford a propinquity to the past and the dead that is unique in its sensuous materiality and essential for the study of history. Prong discusses the practice of situating oneself among the imaginary things of literary fiction,
demonstrates how one can come to understand the dead body as constituted among the order of imaginary things, and discusses the encyclopedic form. Through this theoretical analysis, Prong also provides a (brief) encyclopedia of materiality as it is presented in Hazel Jane Plante’s 2019 novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian).