I found the excerpts from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter so captivating that I will probably read more of the book this summer. Bennett’s aim “to highlight what is typically cast in the shadow: the material agency […]
Of all the readings this week, I found Foster’s pieces the most captivating. Specifically, the section “The Artifice of Abjection” in “The Return of the Real.” Foster writes clearly, concisely, and simply about […]
I find the linking of waste and fat in Divinity: A Dossier convincing, though I do wish that Sedgwick and Moon had spent more time on the comparison. Both authors effectively ground the link with […]
In Trashed, Derf Backderf refers to the dump as “Hell on Earth,” his protagonist noting that “it’s designed so you can’t see it from outside…so the full horror of [the] place isn’t known” (105). […]
1) In “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill,” Joshua Reno summarizes the adoption of “sanitary landfills” in the 1950s. Reno emphasizes the role such landfills play in k […]
In this poem, Williams illustrates his mature aesthetic. For Williams, the poet, “the man of imagination,” must sift through wasteful, empty “words and shapes” in order to create art that is both efficient and ear […]
Reno’s summary of Purity and Danger seems accurate. For Douglas, things are deemed waste only in relation to culturally specific social systems: “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a s […]
