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 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.

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.

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