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• W2896479765 abstract "Over the last few years I have offered a handful of undergraduate courses in theEnvironmental Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign. As is the case with many of my colleagues, teaching is oneof the most powerful ways I think through the broad questions and assumptionsguiding my writing projects. It is the most immediate, satisfying, and surprisingway of thinking with others, which is, after all, the goal of our writing andresearch. Especially in the case of topics in the Environmental Humanities, teaching affords an opportunity to calibrate our assumptions about our audiences. I can,for example, make no assumptions about my students’ commitment to environmentalism because more obviously than the other keywords that form the groundof my classes – keywords like literature, print culture, realism, or nineteenthcentury – the terms of the Environmental Humanities are still emerging in relationship to debates in the academy, the media, the political arena, and thecorporate world.That is, while in a more traditional course it may well become clear that certainterms like “literature,” once thought to be fixed, are actually always under debate, itis already the case that the terms “environment,” “nature,” and “climate change” areunder pressure in an Environmental Humanities class. Indeed, that’s part of the intellectual energy of the field. But it also means that I do not know how my studentsdefine those terms, how they arrived at their definitions, or even whether they areespecially attached to them. Among the most interesting things I’ve learned as Iorganize classes in the Environmental Humanities is which terms students who arecommitted in some way to environmental politics – anything from conservation andanimal welfare to freeganism – don’t care at all about. One of those terms is, oddlyenough, “climate change,” which strikes students as too abstract. They are indifferent to the warning that seems curled in the word “change,” and they much preferthe contested, now-superseded term “global warming.”Certainly the question of scale is at work here – framing problems in differenttemporal registers, from the geologic to the immediate, is among the challenges ofteaching literature about climate change. The act of reading a novel, after all, occursin a familiar and a soothing temporality, no matter how extravagant the novel’s ownexperiments with time. Rather, the preference for “global warming” over climatechange is linked to tactility of the word “warming.” Despite the menace of thephrase, warming has a sensory component that localizes it, anchors it in the body,in touch, in the present. Tactility and materiality is, then, the final piece of howI’ve evolved with my students a class in narrative, garbage, and climate change.Garbage and waste seem democratically available for analysis, but they are alsowords that let us think about scale – the immediacy of consumer desire, for example, in relationship to the slow accumulation of toxins in the human body. Andthey let us think, quite obviously, about materiality – not just about what an objectis when it becomes garbage, but how an object embodies values that are in themidst of changing.When scholars discuss pedagogy, it’s easy to speak abstractly about the kinds ofknowledge we hope to convey, to invoke principles of good teaching, to describethe interactions between an ideal instructor and an ideal student, but we also knowthat no matter how meaningful those pedagogical abstractions are, all teaching islocal. And it too is embodied, material, shot through with half understood knowledges that come from sensory input other than what is audible in discussion. Realteaching unfolds as a particular, embodied group of students evolves into a classwith its own personality, a personality that in turn begins to direct the shape andthe speed of conversation, the specific way a text yields under pressure, the intellectual intimacies that spring up when ideas become more than academic.Indeed, teaching is even more local than that: a given class depends on the timeof day, the arrangement of chairs, the room itself. It is a strangely contingent exercise, and yet it is deeply materially grounded. The classroom is its own ecology, andpart of how I have strategized the design of my classes on garbage and literature isby connecting the lived, local expertise that students have about their environmentsto the environment of the classroom, in which material concerns are connected tolonger histories and patterns of representations. But if the classroom is its own ecology, it is also paradoxically positioned to let students see the ascending scale ofmaterial problems. The design of the class is also intended to enable students towork from the local to think about how ideas about scale structure how we knowand experience narrative. The most obvious illustration of the scale of imaginingand narrating garbage? It’s everything from an irritating candy wrapper on a citystreet to a huge global industry connected to resource extraction, human exploitation, material recovery, and toxic dumping. The trick of the class is how tocoordinate scale, how to identify and relate different discourses about garbage andbegin to theorize how those discourses emerge from deep fantasies about thesignificance of objects, especially at the end of their lives.It’s here that literary studies has a privileged vantage point; it’s the bread andbutter of the field to be able to think about how discourse and narrative structurerepresentations of historical problems. And it is the bread and butter of the field tohold open those representations so that we can look closely at how narrative itselftries to propose solutions to deep historical problems. Garbage, the end result of aprocess of production or consumption intended to make something wonderfullynew and pristine, is thus, like Marx’s commodity, a very queer thing indeed. Andfor that reason, it is a fascinating category through which to focus attention onobjects, commodities, gifts, and fetishes because it seems to be outside the systemsof exchange. Garbage looks all used up, as though its story has already been fullytold. Once used up or discarded, any object – a broken radio, a popsicle stick, a tornshirt – is just trash. Drained of value, it seems to be the end of once-complex, onceluxuriantly proliferating narratives of pleasure or necessity.Practically speaking, a literature class on garbage can come together in a lot ofways. You can, for instance, take a book history approach and look at what happensin the making of books – the role of the paper industry, the ecological impact ofthe shipping and circulation of books, the recycling and the disposal of books (asurprisingly lucrative niche industry), and the emergence of e-waste. You canorganize a class on the how the metaphor of garbage has historically structuredrepresentations of devalued people and places, or how trash figures a degraded literary taste, a degraded literary text, and even the degraded subjects who read thosetexts. After a some tinkering with how to most broadly conceive of the heart ofthe course – what is the relationship between metaphor and materiality, a questionthat is, as literary scholars know, the stubborn and unresolvable problem of representation itself – I decided to approach garbage and waste by focusing on thecategory of objects whose value is compromised. Garbage, to paraphrase MaryDouglass, is “matter out of place,” and it therefore directs our attention to how wecome to value things, how we experience the work of things in our psychic lives,how their disappearance or inevitable decay helps us see the shape of a particularindividual or cultural desire.This is why we begin with objects – what we might call cynically “pre-garbage.”We begin by surveying theories about the value of objects: Freud’s “Mourning andMelancholia”; Marx’s theory of exchange and use; Bill Brown’s work on things andthing theory; Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift; studies of garbology and the excavation of dumps and midden heaps; and recent studies of the waste and recyclingindustries. Those studies inform our analysis of a selection of novels that payparticular attention to objects whose value is somehow compromised, objects thatteeter between categories of useful and useless, priceless and worthless, working ordamaged. The class – nominally categorized as contemporary U.S. literature – thusincludes Frank Norris’s McTeague, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, E.L. Doctorow’sHomer and Langley. We read a memoir of a woman who was raised by a motherwho was a clinical hoarder, and then we look at episodes of Hoarders and AntiquesRoadshow. The long twentieth century is not short of novels about what it meansto love objects – to collect them or hoard them, to value them or imbue them withfetishistic meaning. How, we ask as we read them, do different narrative genres fromspecific historical periods figure the relationship between human desire andobjects? How do they tell the story of objects and compromised value, and howdo they assume that objects themselves can tell a story about human desires andneeds?And finally, in the last part of the class, we turn our attention to compromised" @default.
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• W2896479765 title "Garbage and literature: Generating narrative from a culture of waste" @default.
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