Literary Theory & Criticism

Vibrant Matter, Vital Text: New Materialism and the Ontology of Literary Representation

Download PDF Citation: Carter, Mason. “Vibrant Matter, Vital Text: New Materialism and the Ontology of Literary Representation.” Radical Literary Inquiry, 2026, https://www.authormasoncarter.com/2026/09/vibrant-matter-vital-text-new.html. Abstract This essay interrogates the confluence of new materialist philosophy and literary representation, proposing that matter, long relegated to the status of an inert backdrop within humanist criticism, possesses an agentic capacity that literature both enacts and thematizes in ways the linguistic turn could not accommodate. Drawing upon the theoretical apparatus furnished chiefly by Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, the discussion moves beyond the anthropocentric and constructivist paradigms that governed much of twentieth-century criticism, positing instead a vibrant ontology in which textual objects, bodies, and milieux participate as co-constitutive agents of signification rather than as mute occasions for huma…

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