The Literature of Waste

Susan Signe Morrison is Professor of English at Texas State University, USA.

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