Abstract
After my parents died within two months of each other in the spring of 2010, my brothers and I were left with emptying the family house we had called home for 47 years. As both my parents were writers, the amount of paper and folders crammed into every file cabinet and container was daunting. I remember venturing into the attic one dreary day, depressed and downhearted. This top floor held my father’s study, replete with hundreds of chemistry journals and books, as well as files chock-full of everything from book contracts to chapter versions from the 1960s. Then I braved one of the many closets. I carried masters’ theses from my dad’s students at New York University written in the 1950s and 1960s. Catching a corner awkwardly, I dropped these weighty tomes on my feet. Dispiritedly, I finally managed to clear a path to the file cabinet in the corner, where my mother had long hoped to retrieve her journals from the 1930s and 1940s. The metal drawer creaked open. Imagine my joy in finding income tax returns from the 1980s, packing lists for trips taken in the 1970s, and bills for items purchased decades before.
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Notes
Cole Porter, “You’ve Got That Thing,” in Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929).
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 7.
Jane Bennett, “The Elements,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4.1 (2013): 109.
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 2.
A variety of thinkers work in these related fields: Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Manuel De Landa, to name a few. See Andrew Cole, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies,” minnesota review 80 (2013): 111.
Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Heather I. Sullivan, “The Ecology of Colors: Goethe’s Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 82.
Eileen A. Joy, “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 169.
A term associated with De Landa. See Alan Montroso, “Human,” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), 39;
Nigel Clark and Myra J. Hird, “Deep Shit,” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies 1 (2014): 51.
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnestota Press, 2012), 34.
Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary Theory 43 (2012): 230. See Cole, “The Call of Things,” 108, 111.
Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 4, quoting Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174.
Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Introduction: All Things,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 7.
Bennett describes this as “the strange ability of ordinary man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.” Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32.3 (June 2004): 350.
William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 12.
Paul Reyes, “Bleak Houses: Digging through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2008. 31.
Stacy Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 187–188. In this article Alaimo nuances her concept by pointing out that “although particular strands of thing theory, object-oriented ontology, speculative realisms, new vitalisms, and material feminisms may or may not be particularly posthumanist or environmentally oriented, material ecocriticism, by definition, focuses on material agencies as part of a wider environmentalist ethos that values ecosystems, biodiversity, and nonhuman life” (193).
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2, citing W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156–157.
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 130. “We are bequeathing a particular futurity through a projected responsibility for the toxicity, contamination, and resource depletion our epoch created.” Jesse Goldstein, “Wastelands,” http://discardstudies.com/discard-studies-compendium/.
Christopher Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 61.
See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 53.
Ruth Evans, “Lacan’s belles-lettres: On Difficulty and Beauty,” in On Style: An Atelier, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Anna Kłosowska (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013), 20.
Ibid., 17. Robertson similarly aspires “to help brown, blacken and mottle environmental discourse—adding poop to the party, so to speak.” Eric Robertson, “Volcanoes, Guts and Cosmic Collisions: The Queer Sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 18.1 (2014): 65.
Morton, Ecology without Nature, 17. “Human society used to define itself by excluding dirt and pollution. We cannot now endorse this exclusion, nor can we believe in the world it produces. This is literally about realizing where your waste goes. Excluding pollution is part of performing Nature as pristine, wild, immediate, and pure.” Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2 (2010): 274.
A. R. Ammons, Garbage (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 74.
Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” in Literature: A Pocket Anthology, ed. R. S. Gwynn, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Longman, 2012), 566.
Serpil Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 24, quoting
Charles Birch, “The Postmodern Challenge to Biology,” in The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 1988), 70–71. Also Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, 80.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 6. She cites Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City (New York: Doubleday, 1998) 96–97.
Wendy Wheeler, “Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 78.
Kellie Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 100.
Wayne C. Booth, “Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 54–55.
For Beowulf’s revision of the fight with Grendel’s Mother and her origins, see Dana M. Oswald, “‘Wigge under Wætere’: Beowulf’s Revision of the Fight with Grendel’s Mother,” Exemplaria 21 (2009): 63–82.
See Seth Lerer “Grendel’s Glove,” English Literary History 61 (1994): 732, writes about “corporeal poetics,” the way in which “each body contains all the parts that may describe the world; in turn, the things of the world may describe in full all the body.” Grendel as a “disabled” other must be controlled by the “normal” hero. “The disability becomes a power derived from its otherness, its monstrosity, in the eyes of the ‘normal’ person. The disability must be decapitated and then contained in a variety of magic wallets.”
Lennard J. Davis, “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body,” in Visualizing the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the Fragmented Torso, Reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 2405. Here, the magic wallet is displaced onto the glove Beowulf ascribes to Grendel.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Ecostitial,” in Inhuman Nature, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), vi. Compare to the “noble body” of the pebble held in the hand of the speaker of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Pebble.”
John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 271. Orlando writes, “Time wears things out or lends them dignity: it wears things out and lends them dignity.”
Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel with Alessandra Grego (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 11–12.
Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 18. http://openhumanitiespress.org/realist-magic.html.
Richard Conniff, “Useless Creatures,” The New York Times, September 14, 2014, accessed October 18, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/useless-creatures/?_php=trueand_type=blogsand_r=0.
Heather I. Sullivan, “Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012): 528. “[Catriona] Sandilands and [Timothy] Morton prompt us to ask what exactly is wrong with pollution, a word that comes freighted with a history of disciplining sexual as well as environmental deviance? For Sandilands, ‘environmental governmentality [is] a particular technology of abjection, a discourse organizing, both symbolically and somatically, myriad practices of ingestion and excretion, desire and revulsion. It is an irrevocably social process, linking a desire for internal corporeal order with the expulsion of disorderly and terrifying substances, disorderly and terrifying bodies.’”
Greg Garrard, “Nature Cures? Or How to Police Analogies of Personal and Ecological Health,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012): 503, quoting
Catriona Sandilands, “Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body Politic,” Social Philosophy Today 19 (2004): 31.
Ralph A. Lewin, Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Sociohistorical Coprology (New York: Random House, 1999), 141.
As Laporte asks, “Who will write the history of Saint Jerome, advisor to the ladies of Rome from 382 to 385, who warned against the practice of smearing one’s face with shit to preserve a youthful complexion? How could he know that the Church itself would later sanctify women who—surpassing common semen-swallowers and rivaling Sadean heroines—went so far as to ingest it?” Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. N. Benabid and R. El-Khoury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 102.
Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11.
Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 78, discussing Thompson, Rubbish Theory.
“The impossibility of getting out of the game and of giving back to things their toy-like uselessness heralds the precise instant at which infancy comes to an end, and defines the very notion of seriousness.” Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape De l’évasion, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 52.
As Hawkins points out, pieces of trash are objects weighted with history and can carry a “sensuous presence.” Gay Hawkins, “Waste in Sydney: Unwelcome Returns.” PMLA 122 (2007): 351. Alaimo takes Hawkins to task. Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins,” 194–195.
Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks (New York: Harper Teen, 2004), 38.
Italo Calvino, “La Poubelle Agréée,” in The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 109.
H. G. Adler, The Journey: A Novel, trans. Peter Filkins, Afterword by Jeremy Adler (New York: Random House, 2008), 268.
Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 98; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 21.
Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 240, 238, 239.
T. Tyler, Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 63. As Alain Robbe-Grillet points out, “In practically all our contemporary literature these anthropomorphic analogies are too insistently, too coherently, repeated, not to reveal a whole metaphysical system.”
Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy” (1958), in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), 78, quoted in Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32. The world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It is … quite simply. But it is not the world of the humanist text and anthropomorphic metaphor. “The world is … the strange.” Quoted in
Raylene Ramsay, Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992), 245.
Juliet Fleming, “Scraping by: Towards a Pre-Historic Criticism,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3 (2012): 121–122; citing
Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); also Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 120.
Scott Slovic, “Editor’s Note,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 456, quoting
Catherine Diamond, “Hiking in Yangming Mountain: ‘Listening,’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 684.
Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, 82. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 120; Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 8; Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism,” 29; and Hubert Zapf, “Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 52. Carolynn Van Dyke writes about “the poetics of transmorphism” in this same vein.
Carolynn Van Dyke, “Touched by an Owl? An Essay in Vernacular Ethology,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7 (2014): 15.
Morton, Realist Magic, 17. After all, Morton points out, “I can’t help anthropomorphizing everything I handle … Just as I fail to avoid anthropomorphizing everything, so all entities whatsoever constantly translate other objects into their own terms … Everything else is doing the same thing.” Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 207.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 139–140. Harman contends Levinas does not go quite far enough in his argument, remaining centered on the human. Yet Levinas sets up object-oriented sympathies, laying “the groundwork for a strange new form of realism.” Graham Harman “Levinas,” 408. Levinas respects the object, where its matter provides its meaning. Ibid., 411, quoting Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 82, 192–193.
Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller, Introduction by Richard A. Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 11.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 88;
Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 141.
The quote continues, “as that which is said —reduced to fixed identity or synchronized presence—is an ontological closure to the other.” Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 29.
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 17.
He continues, “[that marks] interspaces where identities are formed through negotiation, interaction, and engagement,” and “contact zones … wherein dialectic relations of self and other … [are] always charged with a mbivalence … between extremes of attraction and repulsion, of mastery and anxiety.” Michael Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 36, 41.
Leo Lionni, little blue and little yellow (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), Unpaginated.
All quotes from Heather O’Neill, “The Secret Life of Our Trash Can,” The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2014, accessed November 28, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/the-secret-life-of-our-trash-can.html.
Julian Yates, “Sheep-Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 179, [173–209].
Lowell Duckert, “Speaking Stones, John Muir, and a Slower (Non) Humanities,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), 278. See Joy, “You Are Here,” 163.
Compare to Timothy Morton, “Treating Objects Like Women: Feminist Ontology and the Question of Essence,” in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, ed. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56–69.
Mark Atherton (trans.), Hildegard von Bingen: Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 2001), 107.
Even minerals and rocks, “these apparently inert strata,” contain “traces of bygone biospheres.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 8, citing Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 50.
“An alliance between human beings and primordial stone can loosen the temporal fixedness of one and the spatial immobility of the other.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Stories of Stone,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1 (2010): 61.
Perhaps, then, it’s not a matter of equalizing the playing field between human and nonhuman, not a “flat morality but one of infinite, incommensurable hierarchies.” Karl Steel, “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012): 33.
S. A. J. Bradley (trans. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1982), 404.
Lowell Duckert, “Glacier,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 4.1 (2013): 70.
See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 11, referencing Michael De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), 26–27.
Duckert, “Speaking Stones,” 274. Citing Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. For more on slowness see Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard,” 254, and Joy, “You Are Here,” 172.
All references to the translation by Roy M. Liuzza, “Two Old English Elegies from the Exeter Book: The Wanderer and The Ruin,” accessed October 19, 2014, http://web.utk.edu/~rliuzza/401/Elegies.pdf.
“Objects in ruins speak back.” Tim Edenson, “Waste Matter: The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World,” Journal of Material Culture 10.3 (2005): 317. Viney discusses the temporality of ruins, pointing out “the ruin is anchored to a use-time that has passed.” Waste, 140.
“Knowing waste is rendering the indeterminate determinate.” Myra J. Hird, “Knowing Waste: Towards an Inhuman Epistemology,” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 26.3–4 (2012): 454.
“The riddle endows things with history” and makes history a riddle. Daniel Tiffany, “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 74.
Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Traveling Onion,” in Literature: A Pocket Anthology, ed. R. S. Gwynn, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Longman, 2012), 778–779.
Quotes from Peter Campion (trans.), “Who Is So Smart, So Crafty-Spirited?” in The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 66–73; see also Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 370–372.
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Morrison, S.S. (2015). The Secret Life of Objects: The Audacity of Thingness and the Poignancy of Materiality. In: The Literature of Waste. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394446_10
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