Questions: New Materialism: Agency and Vitality of Things

Question 1

A new materialist reading of the fog in Bleak House would ask which of the following questions?

• A. What does the fog symbolize about the corruption of the Chancery legal system?
• B. How does Dickens use pathetic fallacy to reflect the mood of his characters?
• C. What does the fog *do* — how does it physically act on bodies, movement, vision, and behavior in the text?
• D. What does the fog reveal about Dickens's own attitudes toward urban industrial life?

Answer: (C)

New materialism specifically distinguishes itself from symbolic or representational analysis. Option A asks what the fog represents — that is a symbolic/allegorical reading. Option B asks about emotional mirroring — that is an expressive reading. Option D asks about authorial intention — that is a biographical reading. New materialism asks what the fog *effects*: it physically clogs lungs, impedes movement, obscures vision, and produces a population that behaves differently because of its material presence. The fog is treated as an agent in the story, not a symbol for something else.

Question 2

Jane Bennett's concept of 'vibrant matter' challenges which assumption about agency?

• A. That agency requires intentional consciousness and belongs only to rational human subjects
• B. That matter is composed of atoms rather than continuous fields
• C. That non-human animals deserve moral consideration equal to humans
• D. That social structures determine individual behavior more than biological factors

Answer: (A)

Bennett's core provocation is that agency — the capacity to produce effects — is not the exclusive property of minded beings with intentions. 'Vibrant matter' names the 'thing-power' or lively force inherent in non-human objects, substances, and assemblages. Her analysis of the 2003 North American blackout shows how transmission lines, software protocols, and electrons conspired to produce an outcome no human agent planned or controlled. Agency is reconceived as an emergent property of material assemblages, not a capacity of individual human wills. This challenges the deep humanist assumption that matter is passive and subjects are active.

Question 3

In new materialist criticism, objects and materials in literary texts are treated as active participants that produce effects, not merely as passive context or setting for human action.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the defining claim of new materialist literary criticism. Where traditional criticism treats setting and objects as background or symbolic resource for human characters, new materialism asks what these non-human elements *do* — how they act on characters, shape plot, generate meaning, and participate in assemblages. A medication, a house, a weather system, a letter are not just context; they are agents whose material properties constrain and enable human action in specific ways. This is a different analytical posture: not 'what does it mean?' but 'what does it do?'

Question 4

In new materialism, analyzing what an object 'does' in a literary text is essentially the same as identifying what the object symbolizes.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

These are fundamentally different analytical moves. Symbolic analysis asks: what does this object stand for, what does it represent about human experience, what is its meaning in the text's figurative economy? New materialist analysis asks: what effects does this object produce, how does its material presence constrain or enable action, what assemblages does it participate in? A gun can symbolize masculine violence (symbolic) or can be analyzed as a material object whose weight, sound, and mechanism act on the nervous system and behavior of characters in specific ways (new materialist). The distinction matters because it changes what you look for and what counts as a finding.

Question 5

Explain the difference between a symbolic reading and a new materialist reading of the same object in a literary text, using a specific example.

Model answer: A symbolic reading asks what an object represents — what it stands for within the text's figurative or thematic logic. A new materialist reading asks what the object does — what material effects it produces on bodies, behavior, and events. For example, a symbolic reading of the money in a Dickens novel might ask what it represents about Victorian capitalism or moral corruption. A new materialist reading would ask how money acts: how its presence or absence physically changes what characters can eat, where they can live, how their bodies age, what decisions become available to them. The symbolic approach treats objects as carriers of meaning; the new materialist approach treats them as participants in material assemblages that produce real effects.

New materialism is not anti-symbolic — it offers an additional or alternative analytical register. The key shift is from objects as signs (pointing to something else) to objects as agents (doing things themselves). This becomes especially productive for texts where non-human forces like weather, disease, infrastructure, or chemicals play roles that exceed their symbolic function — where the material properties of the object are doing work that symbolic analysis cannot fully account for.