Schedule
+ Assigned reading
* Assigned reading excerpt that is part of larger book available for review
° Not required reading
- (Feb. 4) Introductions
– Introductions
– Discuss excerpt from
– Jane Bennett, Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agrée”
– Show scenes from Lucy Walker, dir. Waste Land.
- (Feb. 11) General Studies of Waste
+ Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agrée,” The Road to San Giovanni.
+ Patricia Yaeger, “The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 327–
* John Scanlan, On Garbage
+ William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, (introduction).
- (Feb. 18) Structuralist Anthropology and Psychology
* Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, Intro–chapter two (1-41).
* Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: A Study in Abjection (1-18).
° Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, in The Kristeva Reader (89-98).
+ Suzanne Raitt, “Psychic Waste: Freud, Fechner, and the Principle of Constancy” (73–82).
+ Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal-Erotism” (3 pgs.)
- (Feb. 25) Waste and Modernism: Two Perspectives Feb. 18
+ Walter Benjamin, TK
+ Baudelaire , “The Rag-Picker”
* Marta Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (selections).
+ Tim Armstrong, “Disciplining the Corpus: Henry James and Fletcherism,” American Bodies.
* Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (excerpt)
° Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modern America (excerpts).
- (March 3) Waste and Economics
° Karl Marx, Grundrisse (excerpts).
+ Vijay Gidwani, “Six Thesis on Waste, Value, and Commons”
+ David Graeber, TK, “”
° Steve McCaffery, “A General Economy of Writing,” North of Intention
* Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (excerpts)
- (March 10) Ruins and Junkspace
+ Edward Burnetsky, dir. Manufactured Landscapes
+ Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace”
° Anik Fournier, “The Ruin in the Age of Junkspace”
+ Reading TK about ruins and nationalism
* Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 1-30.
- (March 17) Ethnographies of Waste Management
* Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City.
+ Frederick Kaufman, “Waste Land: A Journey Through the American Cloaca,”
Harper’s (Feb 2008).
* Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste, 1-37, 65-87
(March 24) Waste, Identity, Stigma (Gender, Race, Class, Sexuality)
* Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (excerpts).
* Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (excerpts)
* Katherine Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer”
° Sherry Ortner, “Woman is to Nature as Man is to Culture”
* Judith Butler, Gender Trouble? (excerpt)
* Judith Butler, When Is Life Grievable? (excerpt)
° Samuel Delany, Mad Men (excerpts)
- (March 31) Ecology and Problematizing Nature
+Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
– William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”
– Jonathan Skinner, Ecopoetics “Editor’s Note”
° http://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/
° Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2 (2010): 273–282
° John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook (excerpts)
– Heather Rogers, “Garbage Capitalism’s Green Commerce,” Coming to Terms with Nature, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 238–.
- (April 7) Art History and Waste
* Research Proposal Due
+ Hal Foster, “The Archival Impulse”
– Hal Foster, “Abject Art” in The Return of the Real
– Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.”
– Martha Rosler, “Gar(b)age Sale Standard”
– Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art” manifest
° Hal Foster on Thomas Hirschhorn, Bad News Days
+ Lucy Walker, dir. Waste Land
° “Caroline Jones,” et al. Art and Globalization (excerpts)
° Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant
° Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropofagia”
- (April 14) Matter, Texture, Media
* Sianne Ngai, “Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust”
* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling
+ Lisa Robertson, Nilling, “Disquiet”
+ Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (excerpts)
+ Agnès Varda, dir. The Gleaners and I
° Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum
° Renu Bora, “Outing Texture,” Novel Gazing
- (April 21) Materiality, the Non-Human Turn
* Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
* Scott Terrell Herring, Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture
+ Bill Brown, “Materiality,” Critical Terms for Media Studies
- Student Presentations May 5
- Student Presentations May 12
- Final Essay Due May 19 – No extensions!
