ABL 110: Sarah Wasserman on disappearing things and postwar American fiction

Sarah Wasserman talks to us about ephemera and the disappearing (and defiantly remaining) objects at the heart of post-war US fiction, the subject of her new book, The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel. Wasserman explains how writing about ephemeral objects (from stamps and World’s Fair displays to shop signs and household goods) helps challenge the myth of endless progress, trouble the “monumentalism” of canonical fiction, undermine consumerism, and question the racial and gender imbalances of 20th-century America.