This course will engage some basic paradigms (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, cultural anthropology) for apprehending the human engagement with the inanimate object world, foregrounding such dynamics as fetishism, the uncanny, reification, and circulation. Our engagement will be mediated by literary texts (Balzac, James, Mansfield, Nabokov, Nella Larsen, De Lillo, &c.) and by visual and material texts (Claes Oldenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Brian Jungen, &c.). We will also spend some time attending to the recent interest in object cultures (variously understood) and the human/nonhuman divide. Participants will write two very short papers and one long paper.