Words and worlds: textual representation and new materialism

Abstract

In recent years, academic disciplines across the social sciences and humanities have witnessed a surge of interest around questions of materiality. One strand of this work has been ambitious in its attempts to theorise ‘things-in-themselves’, or the nature and potential of matter, constituting what has come to be called a ‘new materialism’. Geographers have been particularly influential in these debates, especially through research conducted in the style of non-representational theory. In this work, much emphasis is placed on bodies, objects and enactment in specific spaces and places. Although representation has been theorised within this literature as eventful and performative, there remains relatively little research into the textual and narrative practices by which words make worlds. My interest in this article, therefore, is to draw out how language has been theorised within non-representational theory and in new materialist thought more broadly, with the aim of developing a more nuanced understanding of the work that textual representations do in constituting the material realm. Specifically, I explore how text may be seen as eventful, performative and generative. The second half of the article opens these ideas further through an analysis of The Hare with Amber Eyes, a memoir that in its explicit concern with physical things demonstrates how particular vocabularies, narratives and indeed silences can work to generate the world of the tangible. Moreover, the book explores the nature and possibilities of stories as things themselves, in ways that may open fresh questions for new materialist theory.