Thing theory is a branch of critical theory

Critical theory

Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

 that focuses on the role of things in literature and culture. It borrows from Heidegger's distinction between objects and things, whereby an object becomes a thing when it is somehow made to stand out against the backdrop of the world in which it exists. Thing theorists look at the role of things within literature - at the fixation on particular objects. The theory was largely created by Bill Brown

Bill Brown (critical theory)

Bill Brown is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He occupies the named chair previously held by Wayne Booth and has served as the chair of the University's English Language and Literature Department. His work focuses on American literature, with his second book, A Sense of Things,...

, who edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press. It is considered a leading journal within literary studies, and particularly in the field of critical theory....

 on it in 2001.

Thing theory is particularly well suited to the study of modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

, due to the dictates of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, who declared that there should be "No ideas but in things" or T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's idea of the objective correlative

Objective correlative

An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.- Origin of terminology :Popularized by T. S...

.