The Literature of Waste : Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter

Tracing material and metaphoric waste through the Western canon, ranging from Beowulf to Samuel Beckett, Susan Signe Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions of waste to better understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in what is discarded and seen as garbage. Engaging a wide range of disciplines, Morrison addresses how the materiality of waste has been sedimented into a variety of toxic metaphors. If scholars can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refuse-ing and ostracizing wasted humans? A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this comparative and theoretically innovative book confronts the reader with the ethical urgency present in waste literature itself. "An unparalleled work of literary and cultural criticism, The Literature of Waste brings together the new materialism, ecocriticism and environmental ethics to articulate the transformative and trans-temporal project of waste studies. Wide ranging, lucidly composed, and original, the book inspires and provokes. With its emphasis on aesthetics, ethics, literature, and community, The Literature of Waste makes a strong argument for why the humanities matter - and why the matter the humanities explores must also include waste."--Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, USA"'These fragments I have shored against my ruins, ' writes T.S. Eliot famously in The Waste Land. This phrase beautifully describes both the melange of cultural residue that constitutes modern civilization and the concatenation of disparate sources that informs Morrison's lively, profound, and encyclopedic The Literature of Waste. This is a book that builds wisely upon recent materialist trends in ecocriticism and helps to chart the future of the discipline. I have a new appreciation for the meaning of waste after reading this work."--Scott Slovic, Professor of English, University of Idaho, USA and coeditor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data"Building on her seminal work exploring Chaucerian fecopoetics, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, Morrison extends her brave march into the deepest and dirtiest corners of history's societal relationship with waste. From exploration of conspicuous consumption as a 'means to repute for a gentleman' to the metaphors of sin implied in uncleanliness, Morrison shows that all that litter is indeed - not gold. Having spent a year thinking about waste from my home inside a trash dumpster, I'm intimately in touch with the space that material waste occupies. If only I'd had this book to ponder whilst in the can, I might have found my nights less wasted by fear of impending doom from trash trucks and more filled with beautifully fragrant prose of meaning. You will be enlightened and delighted by this book." - Jeff Wilson, Dean and Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor Dumpster of The Dumpster Project, Huston-Tillotson University, USA"In a novel act of textual recuperation, The Literature of Waste admirably confronts one of the most perplexing facts of human existence - our discomfiting entanglement in waste - and opens it up to new and transformative possibilities. The thing about waste, Morrison reveals, is that it can become a most vital ally in confronting the ethical dilemmas ahead as we attempt to meet the demands of living now in more sustainable ways." John Scanlan, Senior Lecturer of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and author of On Garbage "Susan Signe Morrison is a pioneer of 'fecocriticism, ' a brave and original mode of literary scholarship. She draws upon anthropology, archaeology, ecology, psychology, and history in order to argue for the centrality of waste in our lived experience and its consequent immanence in literary artefacts from Beowulf to The Great Gatsby. She brilliantly shows how the concerns raised by waste operate in ubiquitous ways across various spheres of human experience. But the greatest achievement of The Literature of Waste is its commitment to the ethics of cultural criticism. Forceful and refreshing, Morrison's work is, ultimately, profoundly moral." - Peter J. Smith, Reader of Renaissance Literature, Nottingham Trent University, UK and author of Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-14 Front Matter....Pages 15-15 Codification: The Anxiety of Ambiguity....Pages 17-27 The Fragmented and Corruptible Body: Gendered Waste....Pages 29-43 The Civilizing Process: Divisive Divisions....Pages 45-53 Memory and Narrative: Ruins, Nostalgia, and Ghosts....Pages 55-64 Failed Source Reduction: Conspicuous Consumption and the Inability to Minimize....Pages 65-74 Urban Myths: The Civilized and Pristine City-Body....Pages 75-83 Interiorized Waste: Sin and Metaphysical Meaninglessness....Pages 85-95 The Toxic Metaphor of Wasted Humans: Those Filthy Cleaners Who Scrub Us Spotless....Pages 97-117 Front Matter....Pages 119-119 The Secret Life of Objects: The Audacity of Thingness and the Poignancy of Materiality....Pages 121-138 Trash Meditation: The Arts of Transience and Proximity....Pages 139-148 Front Matter....Pages 149-149 Waste Aesthetics: Puns, Litter-ature, and Intertextuality....Pages 151-163 Gleaning Aesthetics: Poetry as Communal Salvage....Pages 165-170 Front Matter....Pages 13-13 Compost Aesthetics: The Poet[h]ics of Metaphor....Pages 173-177 Poetry as Homeopathy: The Poet as Ragpicker....Pages 179-199 Back Matter....Pages 201-330 "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 refuse-ing 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 material and metaphoric waste through the western canon, Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions to understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in waste. A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this book urges the reader to see disposal as the creation of waste literature itself "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