Prompt 1: Does psychoanalytic thought (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, etc.) construe waste as a necessary “other” to psychic health in a consistent way? Or is there a break between Freud and later psychoanalytic th […]

Class: reminder there’s no class next Monday. Instead we’ll meet on Wednesday, 2/15 at 6:30.

Here are next week’s prompts. Choose only one of the three prompts below. (And even within each prompt, you do not […]

Class,

Just to let you know that I shared the Dropbox folder with all of you after Monday’s class, so if you didn’t get a notice via email, let me know ASAP and I’ll connect you.

Also, I just wanted to alert […]

Hi class, actually — no blog post required — just focus on your research presentations. But use these questions as a guide to reading and discussion:

Option 1: Sedgwick and Ngai (on p. 166-7, 180, 185-) […]

Option 1: In very different ways, Herring and Bennett shift the focus to the “lives” of objects and what happens when we treat material objects as though they possessing a social/political meaning. Discuss the […]

Open blog prompt 1: The artists’ writings and manifestoes (and the artists described by Foster) all address the subject of waste, but in very different ways. Which did you find most striking, most resonant?

In […]

Class, please email me the prospectus of your final project by Friday, April 1.

These guidelines in writing a prospectus may be useful as a guide. You do not need to follow them to the letter, as they are for a […]

Prompt possibility one: In the readings for this week, how do unspoken ideas about race, class, gender, or some other some other social structure (nation? geographic location? language?) undergird our conceptions […]

Choose one  prompt and respond in the comments.

Prompt 1: How do this week’s readings complicate associations between waste (in literal or metaphoric forms) and what Erving Goffman calls “spoiled identity”? Is […]

Hi class, my prompts this week are a little more open-ended. Choose whichever questions are most interesting to you in the prompts.

Prompt option 1: Both Nagle and George spend a fair amount of time nar […]

Just a quick note about this coming week’s class:

1. We’ll be reading an excerpt from Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, which Kevin will be reviewing. It picks up on the economic discussion from last week but is […]

Class, for this week, please generate three meaty discussion questions and post them in the comments of this post. Try to generate one discussion question for each article (Reno, Gidwani, Waldrop). To make the […]

Option 1 — Do a close reading of the following passage from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923), a major American modernist work. (By close reading, I mean focus in on particular words and phrases an […]