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I begin with a moment from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) describing an encounter with things, in the form of an enumeration and a collection of sorts, where bodily, sensory, mental, and imaginative life are fused. Probing the porous boundaries, affinities, and frictions between contemporary subjects and objects, with bodies, special minds, and things, this essay develops novel approaches to notions of materiality, the object world, and embodied experience while also interrogating developments in the area of material culture, object studies, cultural phenomenology, and thing theory. Haddon and Boone (the narrator/protagonist) insisted on the material basis of all aspects of human existence and finally concluded that the subject can be materially transformed through interacting with objects.

We examine the relationship between high-performance work system (HPWS) and job satisfaction, drawing on the ‘too much of a good thing’ theory, to establish whether a non-linear relationship can explain conflicts in previous findings. Moreover, we extend the study by exploring the mediating role of work overload and the moderating role of person–organization fit (P–O fit). Based on a cross-sectional data set of 220 employees and a longitudinal data set of 373 employees from organizations in China, the empirical findings show an inverted U-shaped relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction. Results also indicate that the relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction is fully mediated by work overload, and that P–O fit negatively moderates HPWS-work overload and HPWS-job satisfaction relationships. These results shed new light on how HPWS impacts employee outcomes and practical implications for managers are discussed.

Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of , Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of , and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s , and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.

The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in Syrian American author Jennifer Zeynab Joukhader’s novel A Map of Salt and Stars (2018). It highlights the role of certain “Things” in Nour’s family’s healing process from the traumatic experiences of the Syrian war. The article also sheds light on the war’s reshaping of the objects and the individuals’ relationship with them. The objects that this article investigates are as varied as mundane utensils (a shattered plate), cherished souvenirs (Zahra’s bracelet), and even magical objects (Nour’s stone). Particularly, the article examines the establishment of the close association between the characters and these objects and the impact of this association on the family’s journey towards safety and recovery. For this reason, the present study is situated within the theoretical frameworks of the “Thing” theory and psychological trauma. This article argues that the close association that the characters establish with certain “Things” accompanies them during their grief and traumatic experiences, and subsequently initiates and facilitates their recovery.

Why do humans get angry with objects? Why is it that a malfunctioning computer, a broken tool, or a fallen glass causes an outbreak of fury? How is it possible to speak of an inanimate object's recalcitrance, obstinacy, or even malice? When things assume a will of their own and seem to act out against human desires and wishes rather than disappear into automatic, unconscious functionality, the breakdown is experienced not as something neutral but affectively--as rage or as outbursts of laughter. Such emotions are always psychosocial: public, rhetorically performed, and therefore irreducible to a \"private\" feeling. By investigating the minutest details of life among dysfunctional household items through the discourses of philosophy and science, as well as in literary works by Laurence Sterne, Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Heimito von Doderer, Kreienbrock reconsiders the modern bourgeois poetics that render things the way we know and suffer them.

The nexus of humans and objects requires careful consideration of their interaction throughout the ages. Bill Brown's phenomenal essay \"Thing Theory\" (2001) has paved a new way for reexamining this affiliation. This paper is an attempt to study the different roles of miniatures in shaping the life of Petronella Oortman, a seventeenth-century Dutch woman. In so doing, the paper closely reads Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist (2014). Drawing theoretical insights from Susan Stewart, Gaston Bachelard, among others, the paper probes into the significance of miniatures in shaping anthropomorphic relationships.

This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects, as entangled material agencies, can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series among other artists’ work are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as the examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media is revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.

This essay explicates Édouard Glissant’s aesthetics of opacity in terms of its formation and significance. This theory comes into form in the historical condition of colonial alterity. In The Poetics of Relation (originally published in French in 1990), Glissant extrapolates opacity as the fundamental of aesthetics from such linguistic activities as creole languages and improvised stories found in the Caribbean islands. More than a postcolonial defense of identity alterity, opacity denotes the linguistic expression of material alterity. It means an involuntary flourishing of linguistically enhanced dynamic of exchange, connection, and making in the landscapes of compelling affordances. Such languages cannot be reduced to texts because they are derived from the inevitably alien ground called \"the other of Thought,” or a recognition and practice of radical difference. The significance of the aesthetics of opacity lies in that, Glissant asserts, humans can linguistically express the engagement with material ecologies while avoiding the authoritative domination of reason.

This essay tests how Lewis Carroll's Alice books might bridge four potentially disparate approaches to literary analysis: thing theory, animal studies, actor-network theory, and food studies. Expanding the investigation of objects and \"things\" in literature beyond a human/thing dichotomy, I draw on the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour to explore the entanglement of humans, objects, animals, and appetites that generates so much of the wonder in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). I argue that these texts attempt to reconcile the Victorian destabilization of discrete \"human\" and \"animal\" categories facilitated by evolutionary theory with an increasingly commodified culture where everything and everyone seem potentially consumable. The Alice books give us \"things\" in networks, but networks that supersede, and have utility beyond, the human. Eating, I propose, is our way into these networks. I show how Carroll presents a world that is both fully social and thoroughly objectified, where humans, animals, and objects trade, share, and fight for positions in a network of edible things. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]