Waste matters: Expenditure and waste management in 20th- and 21st-century poetics
Item
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Title
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Waste matters: Expenditure and waste management in 20th- and 21st-century poetics
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:8a9d0ed6aaac:10290
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identifier
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10267
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Creator
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Schmidt, Christopher,
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Contributor
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Wayne Koestenbaum
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Womens studies | English literature | Anality | Avant-Garde Literature | Experimental Poetry | Poetry | Queer Theory | Waste
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines how waste, in its various literal and metaphorical manifestations, has influenced 20th- and 21st-century arts and letters. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the urgency of this inquiry is pressing. "Waste Matters," however, is guided by a belief that before we demonize waste in the current millennium, we need first to understand its decisive influence on the art and life practices of the previous century. In chapters devoted to Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Andy Warhol, and conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, I examine how these artists resist and reflect the pressures of consumer capitalism, with its conflicting emphases on efficiency and disposability, as well as the anal sublimations that typically govern artistic creation.;Waste is a broad category, encompassing not just the waste matter of garbage and excrement, but also the wasted and unprofitable effort that poetry represents. The artists I consider express such slippage in their work. Problems of artistic production---Am I blocked? Do I produce too much? ---become problems of bodily consumption and elimination. In the dissertation's first chapter, I suggest that Stein's relationship to the literary market is reinscribed in her obsession with Alice B. Toklas's digestive habits. In manuscripts she left Toklas to type, Stein often interleaved love notes entreating the costive Toklas to produce a "cow"---identified elsewhere as "an elegant name for stool." The intimacy and queerness of this traffic between the body and writing---as well as its intimations of a boundary-disturbing sexuality---highlights the pressing relevance of sexuality to my study. Because queer desires are often figured as unregenerative, and homosexuality itself an index of "spoiled identity," the queer artist's engagement with waste may be especially identificatory and profound.;In this study I argue that the self-consciousness of poetic language, animated by a tension between formal constraint and linguistic excess, offers an especially acute measure by which to gauge the impact of waste on the aesthetic economy. (I define poetics broadly to include experimental writing which, in its self-consciousness and formal innovation, approaches the condition of poetry; Andy Warhol's talk-novel a is one such work.) Discussing poetry's resistance to market pressures, James Longenbach has described poetic form as a way of "keeping down production." Accordingly, I consider New York School poet James Schuyler's "skinny poem" form as a method of waste management, in which the poet controls bodily and cultural excess through poetic constraint and camp recuperation (particularly in Andrew Ross's materialist definition of camp as a "rediscovery of history's waste").;Other figures in my study, however, flout traditional models of poetic orderliness, instead crafting monuments to waste-making. Both Stein and Ashbery, for example, are profligate not only in their dazzling rates of productivity, but in their promiscuous uses of language; their works often exceed our abilities to assimilate them to paraphrase. Goldsmith is even more direct in his waste-making agenda. Basing his poetics on Warhol's factory model of production, Goldsmith repurposes cultural ephemera through slavish transcription, a practice he tellingly calls "uncreative writing." By miming capitalist production, without the corresponding profit, Goldsmith's work makes evident the gap between a poetic economy and a market-driven one. Poetry, however, as it situated athwart typical channels of currency and exchange, possesses one advantage over capitalism of being able to recuperate waste as value---a recuperation with potential relevance to our current ecological crisis.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
