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?