The Literature of Waste (PDF)

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

"An unparalleled work of literary and cultural criticism, The Literature of Waste brings together the new materialism, ecocriticism and environmental ethics to articulate the transformative and trans-temporal project of waste studies. Wide ranging, lucidly composed, and original, the book inspires and provokes. With its emphasis on aesthetics, ethics, literature, and community, The Literature of Waste makes a strong argument for why the humanities matter - and why the matter the humanities explores must also include waste." - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, USA

"'These fragments I have shored against my ruins,' writes T.S. Eliot famously in The Waste Land. This phrase beautifully describes both the mélange of cultural residue that constitutes modern civilization and the concatenation of disparate sources that informs Morrison's lively, profound, and encyclopedic The Literature of Waste. This is a book that builds wisely upon recent materialist trends in ecocriticism and helps to chart the future of the discipline. I have a new appreciation for the meaning of waste after reading this work." - Scott Slovic, Professor of English, University of Idaho, USA and coeditor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data

"Building on her seminal work exploring Chaucerian fecopoetics, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, Morrison extends her brave march into the deepest and dirtiest corners of history's societal relationship with waste. From exploration of conspicuous consumption as a 'means to repute for a gentleman' to the metaphors of sin implied in uncleanliness, Morrison shows that all that litter is indeed - not gold. Having spent a year thinking about waste from my home inside a trash dumpster, I'm intimately in touch with the space that material waste occupies. If only I'd had this book to ponder whilst in the can, I might have found my nights less wasted by fear of impending doom