ABSTRACT
Over the last few years I have offered a handful of undergraduate courses in the Environmental Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As is the case with many of my colleagues, teaching is one of the most powerful ways I think through the broad questions and assumptions guiding my writing projects. It is the most immediate, satisfying, and surprising way of thinking with others, which is, after all, the goal of our writing and research. Especially in the case of topics in the Environmental Humanities, teaching affords an opportunity to calibrate our assumptions about our audiences. I can, for example, make no assumptions about my students’ commitment to environmentalism because more obviously than the other keywords that form the ground of my classes – keywords like literature, print culture, realism, or nineteenth century – the terms of the Environmental Humanities are still emerging in relationship to debates in the academy, the media, the political arena, and the corporate world. That is, while in a more traditional course it may well become clear that certain
terms like “literature,” once thought to be fixed, are actually always under debate, it is already the case that the terms “environment,” “nature,” and “climate change” are under pressure in an Environmental Humanities class. Indeed, that’s part of the intellectual energy of the field. But it also means that I do not know how my students define those terms, how they arrived at their definitions, or even whether they are especially attached to them. Among the most interesting things I’ve learned as I organize classes in the Environmental Humanities is which terms students who are committed in some way to environmental politics – anything from conservation and animal welfare to freeganism – don’t care at all about. One of those terms is, oddly enough, “climate change,” which strikes students as too abstract. They are indifferent to the warning that seems curled in the word “change,” and they much prefer the contested, now-superseded term “global warming.” Certainly the question of scale is at work here – framing problems in different
temporal registers, from the geologic to the immediate, is among the challenges of teaching literature about climate change. The act of reading a novel, after all, occurs in a familiar and a soothing temporality, no matter how extravagant the novel’s own experiments with time. Rather, the preference for “global warming” over climate change is linked to tactility of the word “warming.” Despite the menace of the
phrase, warming has a sensory component that localizes it, anchors it in the body, in touch, in the present. Tactility and materiality is, then, the final piece of how I’ve evolved with my students a class in narrative, garbage, and climate change. Garbage and waste seem democratically available for analysis, but they are also words that let us think about scale – the immediacy of consumer desire, for example, in relationship to the slow accumulation of toxins in the human body. And they let us think, quite obviously, about materiality – not just about what an object is when it becomes garbage, but how an object embodies values that are in the midst of changing. When scholars discuss pedagogy, it’s easy to speak abstractly about the kinds of
knowledge we hope to convey, to invoke principles of good teaching, to describe the interactions between an ideal instructor and an ideal student, but we also know that no matter how meaningful those pedagogical abstractions are, all teaching is local. And it too is embodied, material, shot through with half understood knowledges that come from sensory input other than what is audible in discussion. Real teaching unfolds as a particular, embodied group of students evolves into a class with its own personality, a personality that in turn begins to direct the shape and the speed of conversation, the specific way a text yields under pressure, the intellectual intimacies that spring up when ideas become more than academic. Indeed, teaching is even more local than that: a given class depends on the time
of day, the arrangement of chairs, the room itself. It is a strangely contingent exercise, and yet it is deeply materially grounded. The classroom is its own ecology, and part of how I have strategized the design of my classes on garbage and literature is by connecting the lived, local expertise that students have about their environments to the environment of the classroom, in which material concerns are connected to longer histories and patterns of representations. But if the classroom is its own ecology, it is also paradoxically positioned to let students see the ascending scale of material problems. The design of the class is also intended to enable students to work from the local to think about how ideas about scale structure how we know and experience narrative. The most obvious illustration of the scale of imagining and narrating garbage? It’s everything from an irritating candy wrapper on a city street to a huge global industry connected to resource extraction, human exploitation, material recovery, and toxic dumping. The trick of the class is how to coordinate scale, how to identify and relate different discourses about garbage and begin to theorize how those discourses emerge from deep fantasies about the significance of objects, especially at the end of their lives. It’s here that literary studies has a privileged vantage point; it’s the bread and
butter of the field to be able to think about how discourse and narrative structure representations of historical problems. And it is the bread and butter of the field to hold open those representations so that we can look closely at how narrative itself tries to propose solutions to deep historical problems. Garbage, the end result of a process of production or consumption intended to make something wonderfully new and pristine, is thus, like Marx’s commodity, a very queer thing indeed. And for that reason, it is a fascinating category through which to focus attention on objects, commodities, gifts, and fetishes because it seems to be outside the systems
of exchange. Garbage looks all used up, as though its story has already been fully told. Once used up or discarded, any object – a broken radio, a popsicle stick, a torn shirt – is just trash. Drained of value, it seems to be the end of once-complex, once luxuriantly proliferating narratives of pleasure or necessity. Practically speaking, a literature class on garbage can come together in a lot of
ways. You can, for instance, take a book history approach and look at what happens in the making of books – the role of the paper industry, the ecological impact of the shipping and circulation of books, the recycling and the disposal of books (a surprisingly lucrative niche industry), and the emergence of e-waste. You can organize a class on the how the metaphor of garbage has historically structured representations of devalued people and places, or how trash figures a degraded literary taste, a degraded literary text, and even the degraded subjects who read those texts. After a some tinkering with how to most broadly conceive of the heart of the course – what is the relationship between metaphor and materiality, a question that is, as literary scholars know, the stubborn and unresolvable problem of representation itself – I decided to approach garbage and waste by focusing on the category of objects whose value is compromised. Garbage, to paraphrase Mary Douglass, is “matter out of place,” and it therefore directs our attention to how we come to value things, how we experience the work of things in our psychic lives, how their disappearance or inevitable decay helps us see the shape of a particular individual or cultural desire. This is why we begin with objects – what we might call cynically “pre-garbage.”
We begin by surveying theories about the value of objects: Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”; Marx’s theory of exchange and use; Bill Brown’s work on things and thing theory; Marcel Mauss’s work on the gift; studies of garbology and the excavation of dumps and midden heaps; and recent studies of the waste and recycling industries. Those studies inform our analysis of a selection of novels that pay particular attention to objects whose value is somehow compromised, objects that teeter between categories of useful and useless, priceless and worthless, working or damaged. The class – nominally categorized as contemporary U.S. literature – thus includes Frank Norris’s McTeague, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley. We read a memoir of a woman who was raised by a mother who was a clinical hoarder, and then we look at episodes of Hoarders and Antiques Roadshow. The long twentieth century is not short of novels about what it means to love objects – to collect them or hoard them, to value them or imbue them with fetishistic meaning. How, we ask as we read them, do different narrative genres from specific historical periods figure the relationship between human desire and objects? How do they tell the story of objects and compromised value, and how do they assume that objects themselves can tell a story about human desires and needs? And finally, in the last part of the class, we turn our attention to compromised
