This book examines manufactured waste and remaindered humans in literary critiques of capitalism by twentieth-century writers associated with the historical avant-garde and their descendants. Building on recent work in new materialism and waste studies, Rachele Dini reads waste as a process or phase amenable to interruption. From an initial exploration of waste and re-use in three Surrealist texts by Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, and Mina Loy, Dini traces the conceptualization of waste in the writing of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, J.G. Ballard, William Gaddis, and Don De Lillo. In exploring the relationship between waste, capitalism, and literary experimentation, this book shows that the legacy of the historical avant-garde is bound up with an enduring faith in the radical potential of waste. The first study to focus specifically on waste in the twentieth-century imagination, this is a valuable contribution to the expanding field of waste studies.
Table of Content
Introduction.- Chapter One: In search of an epiphany: Redeeming waste and irrupting into the everyday.- Chapter Two: Samuel Beckett’s personnes perdues: Human waste in The Trilogy, Texts for Nothing, and How it I.- Chapter Three: Waste in Donald Barthelme, J.G Ballard, and William Gaddis.- Chapter Four: “Most of our longings go unfulfilled”: De Lillo’s historiographical readings of landfills and nuclear fallout.- Conclusion.- Bibliography
About the author
Rachele Dini teaches at the Foundation for International Education and in the English Department at University College London, UK. She has a BA Hons from Cambridge University, an MA from King’s College London, and a Ph D from University College London, UK.
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