The Poetics Of Waste Queer Excess In Stein Ashbery Schuyler And Goldsmith

Since the modernist period, waste has functioned as a potent symbol of cultural decline and environmental damage, in artworks ranging from T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' to Pixar's Wall-E. In The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith, Christopher Schmidt argues that before we demonize excess out of hand, we ought to attend to the many possibilities for artistic innovation and literary experiment that detritus, garbage, and excrement have afforded artists and writers throughout the twentieth century. Schmidt looks at modernist and postmodernist writers who resist such biases, developing poetries that are formally excessive and preoccupied with waste's transgressive aspects. This lineage stretches from the counter-modernism of Gertrude Stein to the New York School poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, who grapple with and resist ideologies of Taylorist efficiency, cold war 'containment,' and phobias associating queer bodies with mass cultural waste. The book ends with a consideration of more recent conceptual poetries and asks the question, do these twenty-first century writers reanimate modernist prejudices against gender politics and queer sentimentality? -- Provided by Publisher.