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ENG 670: WEEK SIX The Poetics of Garbage in the Age of E-Waste

ENG 670: WEEK SIX The Poetics of Garbage in the Age of E-Waste. NEXT WEEK. Submit research essay prospectus ( by 2/12 ) Prepare progress report on group project Review Hayles on electronic literature and peruse Strickland’s Slipping Glimpse as well as Tao (on CD)

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ENG 670: WEEK SIX The Poetics of Garbage in the Age of E-Waste

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  1. ENG 670: WEEK SIX The Poetics of Garbage in the Age of E-Waste

  2. NEXT WEEK • Submit research essay prospectus (by 2/12) • Prepare progress report on group project • Review Hayles on electronic literature and peruse Strickland’s Slipping Glimpse as well as Tao (on CD) • Alert: Food Justice conference is 2/18-2/21

  3. TOPICS • Environmental imagination in information age • Review of Haraway, Heise, Buell • Garbage: A.R. Ammons’s environmental poetics • Points of comparison: • Toxic: Garbage Island • Edward Burtynsky’s “China: Recycyling”

  4. Environmental Imagination in Information Age

  5. Cyborg IdentityArchetype for postmodern environmentalism “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. [….] Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” -Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”

  6. Toxic DiscourseA trope of boundary crossing “Much work in the field of ecocriticism, established in American literary studies during the 1990s, assumes that the natural world is endangered, and that some of the human activities that threaten nature also put human health and life at risk. [...] My argument focuses on a particular type of risk—exposure to chemical substances [...] This focus allows me to foreground how my argument builds upon Buell's earlier analyses of toxic discourse but also how contemporary novelists use chemical substances as a trope for the blurring of boundaries between body and environment, public and domestic space, and harmful and beneficial technologies.” -Heise, “Toxins, Drugs + Global Systems”

  7. Toxic Discourse (contd.) “The modern nature that toxic discourse recognizes as the physical environment humans actually inhabit is not a holistic spiritual or biotic economy but a network or networks within which, on the one hand, humans are biotically imbricated (like it or not) and, on the other hand, nature figures as modified (like it or not) by techne” (657) -Buell, “Toxic Discourse”

  8. GarbageAmmons’s ecopoetics • THREADS ON THE BLOG • Critique of the verbal/visual: Smell touch, taste, and sound in Ammons’s dump • Motion –– Flow –– Matrix: The form of Garbage • Decomposition v. Transcendence • Sensory Overload & the Question of Scale

  9. A.R. AmmonsPostmodern nature poet • Born and raised in North Carolina – tobacco farmers • WWII Veteran / Training in science and literature • Faculty member at Cornell since 1964 • Collected Poems (1972) won National Book Award • Sphere (1974) considered masterwork – “enacts the ‘form of motion’” w/ 155 sections,4-line stanzas • “A nature poet with a highly developed scientific acumen […] intent on making the consciousness of the poet the secret or real subject of the poem […..] on the search for a unifying principle among minute and divergent particulars.” (David Lehmann) • “The most direct Emersonian in American poetry since Frost.” (Harold Bloom)

  10. “The Form of Motion”Poetics of nature in an age of information KEVIN MCGUIRK ON AMMONS (1998 essay) “Ammons is an obsessively dialectical thinker” “Ammons has made motion his master trope, a concept linked neatly with assay, with ‘60s ‘open’ form and quasi-organic notions of process, epistemologies of relational knowledge like cybernetics, as well as the ontology of distraction.” “Ammons works with a new organic which ‘opens outward, is centrifugal rather than the centripetal ‘innate’ form of Coleridge’ “ (citing Cary Wolfe)

  11. GarbageAmmons’s environmental poetics? • THREADS ON THE BLOG • Critique of the verbal/visual: Smell touch, taste, and sound in Ammons’s dump • Motion –– Flow –– Matrix: The form of Garbage • Decomposition v. Transcendence • Sensory Overload & the Question of Scale

  12. Ammons’s Environmental Poetics (contd.) SUSANNAH HOLLISTER ON SPHERE (2009) “The Apollo space program gave Ammons the metaphor he had long sought: a vehicle that combined the variety of the physical world into a single, unified object.” “What appears unified at once scale [….] become partial […] when one’s view widens, and divisible […[ when one’s view narrows. Ammons makes a poetics out of the constant possibility of reframing.” “He prefers the role of the conduit who ‘just’ holds parts in place to the role of the maker who constructs a whole.”

  13. The DumpLynchpin of contemporary culture “I’m glad the emphasis these days is off dying beautifully and more on light-minded living with The real things––soap, spray-ons, soda, paper, towels, etc. -Ammons, Sphere 55

  14. Toxic: A Garbage IslandDocumenting the refuse of contemporary culture

  15. Edward Burtynsky’s “China: Recycling”Visualizing garbage ––E-waste as matrix

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