Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

Ants, ghosts, cultures, thunderstorms, stock markets, robots, computers: this is just a partial list of the sentient things that have filled American literature over the last century. From modernism forward, writers have given life and voice to both the human and the nonhuman, and in the process addressed the motives, behaviors, and historical pressures that define lives—or things—both everyday and extraordinary.

In Worldly Acts and Sentient Things Robert Chodat exposes a major shortcoming i...