Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-300) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: The Waste-ern Literary Canon in the Waste-ern Tradition -- Part I. Treatment and Disposal: Approaches to Disciplining Waste: 1. Codification: The Anxiety of Ambiguity; 2. The Fragmented and Corruptible Body: Gendered Waste; 3. The Civilizing Process: Divisive Divisions; 4. Memory and Narrative: Ruins, Nostalgia, and Ghosts; 5. Failed Source Reduction: Conspicuous Consumption and the Inability to Minimize; 6. Urban Myths: The Civilized and Pristine City-Body; 7. Interiorized Waste: Sin and Metaphysical Meaninglessness; 8. The Toxic Metaphor of Wasted Humans: Those Filthy Cleaners Who Scrub Us Spotless -- Part II. Energy Recovery and the Dynamic Power of Things: 9. The Secret Life of Objects: The Audacity of Thingness and the Poignancy of Materiality; 10. Trash Meditation: The Arts of Transience and Proximity -- Part III. Recycling and Composting Form as Restitution: 11. Waste Aesthetics: Puns, Litter-ature, and Intertextuality; 12. Gleaning Aesthetics: Poetry as Communal Salvage -- Part IV. Source Reduction and Reuse: Compassion through Generous Metaphor: 13. Compost Aesthetics: The Poet[h]ics of Metaphor; 14. Poetry as Homeopathy: The Poet as Ragpicker.
Summary:
"Establishing the field of Waste Studies, a material ecocritical approach, The Literature of Waste traces literal and figurative waste in the western canon. The materiality of waste - as in landfills, trashcans, garbage dumps, compost piles - inevitably transforms into metaphor. Waste emerges out of various disciplines, such as anthropological codification, psychological repression of bodily decay, sociological civilizing process, historical garbaging of the past, economic conspicuous consumption, urban disposal of bodily waste, religious sin, and philosophical angst. Vibrant materialism disturbs the use of the metaphor of waste used to characterize people as disposable garbage. If we can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refusing and ostracizing wasted humans? Poets, the ragpickers of litter-ature, cure homeopathically. Waste, Compost, and Gleaning Aesthetics acknowledge the poignancy of materiality by revealing the humanity we share. "-- Provided by publisher. "Tracing the presence of material and metaphoric waste in the western canon, Morrison, arguing within a material ecocritical approach, proposes an ethical paradigm by which waste, compost, and gleaning aesthetics in poetry homeopathically heal"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.