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-) discuss the political potential in negative affects like shame and disgust. How did you understand these discussions? Were they convincing to you, either on a personal or more political level?

Option 2: Sedgwick discusses performativity on p. 3-7. This may be a new concept for many of you. But if it interests you, I invite you to ruminate on the performative phrase, “Shame on you!” How does this performative utterance resonate with Sedgwick’s later discussion of shame and identity in chapter 2 of Touching, Feeling (on Henry James).

Option 3: Consider the discussion of James and his digestive problems in chapter 2. Do any of the previous texts we’ve read (Cohen, Douglas, Kristeva, Ngai) illuminate the passages that Sedgwick quotes?

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 positive or negative repercussions of this in Herring, Bennett, or both texts.

Option 2: Ngai discusses the poetics of disgust and claims that it goes mostly undiscussed in prevailing literary and psychoanalytic theories (bear in mind that this article is 14 years old). Do you agree with her? Do the many theoretical (and literary) texts we’ve read thus far support or dispute Ngai’s argument?

Option 3: Ngai describes disgust as “turning away” from an object in repulsion rather than moving toward it in desire. Yet as we saw with Herring, a collector’s excessive desire for an object (or over-attachment to a category of objects) can be perceived by outsiders as disgusting. Is there a contradiction in this? Explore some of the tensions between positive and negative affect (e.g., desire versus disgust) in Herring or some other text we’ve read thus far in the course.

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 your writing, you may wish to connect one of the artist’s works to one of the previous weeks’ readings (e.g., Kristeva on abjection, Gidwani on the economic principles of trash, etc.).

You may also wish to consider what these artists’ visualization or performance of waste brings to the fore. What might they help us perceive visually or phenomenologically that we might not appreciate intellectually?

Alternately, what are the politics of using waste in the artistic sphere?

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 specific class. But the overall advice is useful. This online guide is also useful in writing a prospectus and abstract.

Your prospectus should be approximately one typed page, single-spaced or 1.5-spaced — two or three meaty paragraphs. Your prospectus should: 1. Sketch your topic and argument, including a provisional thesis or research question; 2. Identify the primary texts and secondary literature you will discuss — and how you will use them to support your argument; and 3. Include a short bibliography, in MLA style. (If you quote a text,- you should also cite the page number in MLA style.)

I’ve uploaded a friend’s prospectus for a dissertation to the Sample Writings folder on Dropbox. (It’s for a longer project and contains only a draft bibliography, but gives you some sense of writing at the graduate level.)

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 of nature and the environment? What was the most surprising way this week’s readings prompted you to rethink nature?

More open-ended blog prompt: Respond to an interesting passage in one of the readings that you would like to discuss in class.

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 this association only negative? Do any of the authors give us a way of viewing this association as powerful or useful? How so?

Prompt 2: Do either the Bond Stockton or Butler excerpts cause you to read Kristeva’s theory of abjection differently? How so?

Prompt 3: Is Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat convincing? What are the benefits of this linkage and what are the limitations? What does it allow you to apprehend about waste that you hadn’t previously? (Also feel free to comment on the unusual form of the essay.)

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 narrating how they came to their writing topics. Why do you suppose they do this? What are the advantages and drawbacks to this approach? What does it bring to the fore in their writings and what does it overlook or veil?

Prompt option 2: Nagle makes reference to several academic theorists in her writing, including Marcel Mauss and Wayne Brekhus. What does her use of these theorists add to her analysis? Does Nagle’s use of these theorists differ from how other writers we’ve read draw on academic theory?

Prompt option 3: Nagle argues that it is important to bring to light what is often invisible to us (the necessary labor of the sanitation worker). What is her justification for this? How is this argument compelling or uncompelling? Does it apply to the other readings we completed for this week? Can you think of a counter-argument?

Prompt option 4: Write two medium-length discussion questions for Trashed by Derf Backderf, tying it to some other reading we’ve done in the course.

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 question more substantial, begin it with a claim or quote from the essay in question. (If quoting, cite the page number using MLA style.)

Option 1 — Do a close reading of the following passage from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923). (By close reading, I mean focus in on particular words and phrases and the way they build a symbolic pattern that supports the writer’s argument.) Quote one of the readings for this week (Tichi or Jones, for example) to explain how Williams conceives imagination and poetic composition in gendered ways, related to waste, efficiency, and flow.

Option 2 — Compare the two versions of modernity presented this week: the earlier European versus the later American version. How are economy, waste, and artistic composition figured differently by Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams (or some other modern American artist-figure from the 1920-30s)? What does waste represent in each context, and is it more or less valued in the European or American context? Use quotes from at least one of the readings to support your argument.