S. Morrison

The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter S. Morrison

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; 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. Biographical Note: Susan Signe Morrison is Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. Her 2008 book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics, proposed "Waste Studies" as a field of study for cultural and literary historians. Table of Contents: Introduction: The Waste-ern Literary Canon in the Waste-ern TraditionPART I: TREATMENT AND DISPOSAL: APPROACHES TO DISCIPLINING WASTE1. Codification: The Anxiety of Ambiguity 2. The Fragmented and Corruptible Body: Gendered Waste 3. The Civilizing Process: Divisive Divisions4. Memory and Narrative: Ruins, Nostalgia, and Ghosts5. Failed Source Reduction: Conspicuous Consumption and the Inability to Minimize6. Urban Myths: The Civilized and Pristine City-Body7. Interiorized Waste: Sin and Metaphysical Meaninglessness8. The Toxic Metaphor of Wasted Humans: Those Filthy Cleaners Who Scrub Us SpotlessPART II: ENERGY RECOVERY AND THE DYNAMIC POWER OF THINGS9. The Secret Life of Objects: The Audacity of Thingness and the Poignancy of Materiality10. Trash Meditation: The Arts of Transience and ProximityPART III: RECYCLING AND COMPOSTING: FORM AS RESTITUTION11. Waste Aesthetics: Puns, Litter-ature, and Intertextuality12. Gleaning Aesthetics: Poetry as Communal SalvagePART IV: SOURCE REDUCTION AND REUSE: COMPASSION THROUGH GENEROUS METAPHOR13. Compost Aesthetics: The Poet[h]ics of Metaphor14. Poetry as Homeopathy: The Poet as RagpickerBrief Description: "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. "--Publisher Marketing: Tracing material and metaphoric waste through the Western canon, ranging from Beowulf to Samuel Beckett, Susan 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. The vibrancy of matter itself disturbs these metaphors, especially those used to characterize people as disposable garbage. 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.

Contributor Bio:  Morrison, Susan Signe Professor of English at Texas State University, Susan Signe Morrison lives in Austin, Texas, and writes on topics lurking in the margins of history, ranging from recently uncovered diaries of a teenaged girl in World War II to medieval women pilgrims, excrement in the Middle Ages, and waste.