Of Motion and Emotion: The Mechanics of Endurance in Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears

• Authors: Šlapkauskaitė Rūta
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

Guided by Jacques Derrida’s observations about the aporetic logic of the archive, this reading of Peter Carey’s novel The Chemistry of Tears (2012) relies on contemporary philosophical discourse about the human-thing interface to examine the correlations between pra ctices of mourning, memory, and museology as unfolded in the narrative. The central image of an automaton operates as an extended metaphor both for the metafi ctional feat of the novel, and imagination in its broadest sense, wherein we are reminded of the ethical obligations that things, especially technology, call for. Above all, Carey reveals the porosity of the boundaries between organic and inorganic substance, tethering matter to metaphysics, desire to detritus, and the present to the past.

Keywords

EN

archive; Carey, Peter; museology; memory; Derrida, Jacques

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2017
• Issue: 26/1
• Pages: 101-118

Contributors

author

Šlapkauskaitė Rūta

• Vilnius University

References

• Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Arias, Rosario and Patricia Pulham. eds. 2009. Haunting and Spectrality in NeoVictorian Fiction. Possessing the Past. London: Palgrave.
• Bachelard, Gaston. 2002. Earth and Reveries of Will. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications.
• -----. 2006. Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications.
• Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Susanne Gruss. 2011. “Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism.” Neo-Victorian Studies 4. 2: 1‒23.
• Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
• Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things. The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
• -----. (ed.) 2004. Things. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 99‒133.
• Carey, Peter. 2013. The Chemistry of Tears. London: Faber and Faber.
• Catton, Eleanor. 2012. The Luminaries. London: Granta.
• Connor, Steven. 2013. Paraphernalia. The Curious Lives of Magical Things. London: Profi le Books.
• Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25. 2: 9‒63.
• Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Basic Writings. London and New York: Routledge.
• Macrae Burnet, Graham. 2015. His Bloody Project. London: Contraband.
• Perry, Sarah. 2016. The Essex Serpent. London: Serpent’s Tail.
• Pogue Harrison, Robert. 2003. The Domain of the Dead. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Riskin, Jessica.2003. “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins or Artifi cial Life.” Critical Inquiry 29. 4: 599–633.
• Serres, Michel. 2015. Statues. The Second Book of Foundations. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
• Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Tremain, Rose. 2004. The Colour. London: Vintage.
• Trentmann, Frank. 2009. “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics.” Journal of British Studies 48: 283‒307.
• Trigg, Dylan. 2014. The Thing. A Phenomenology of Horror. Washington and Winchester: Zero Books.
• Watson, Janell. 1999. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust. The
• Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.