@article{oai:icu.repo.nii.ac.jp:00004935,
 author = {Manolescu, Monica},
 issue = {51},
 journal = {人文科学研究 : キリスト教と文化},
 month = {Dec},
 note = {This article offers a reading of contemporary American writer Dawn
Raffel’s memoir entitled The Secret Life of Objects, published by Jade Ibis
Press in 2012, focusing on the affective, mnemonic, narrative and symbolic
significances that it attaches to objects. My reading seeks to embed Raffel’s
book in a larger reflection on the meanings of objects in literature and more
generally in art, and the ways in which they function as extensions of the self
and connectors between people, generations and time periods. The article
draws on the history of objects in art in order to understand the specificity
of Raffel’s approach. Surrealism appears as an important landmark due its
promotion of the banal object to the status of carrier of tremendous symbolic
meaning. Raffel is remotely indebted to the Surrealist celebration of objects,
but her focus is on the affective and social dimension that characterizes
our relationship with certain objects and on the role the latter play in the
construction of identity and memory. Personal identities and histories
are seen as intertwined with and inferable from the familiar objects that
surround us. The object appears as a “psychic mediator” (Tisseron) that
stimulates reminiscence and storytelling. The title of the article (an inversion
of Austin’s well-known How to Do Things with Words) captures precisely this
discursive and mnemonic potential of objects in Raffel’s text. Raffel invites
us to think about how we can do “words with things,” that is start from
objects in order to perform a linguistic exploration of memory, temporality,
self and intersubjectivity.},
 pages = {59--76},
 title = {“How to do words with things”: on Dawn Raffel’s The Secret Life of Objects},
 year = {2019}
}