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 DeLillo. 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 Contents

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

The commodity

Waste and recuperation

Symbols of transience and change

The case for the novel, and for descendants of the avant-garde

From scavenging to window-shopping

Chapter overviews

The case for pursuing “this unattractive occupation”

Chapter One

   In search of an epiphany: Redeeming waste and irrupting into the everyday

“The enigmatic side of beings and things”: Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros

       “Quite unexpected, quite improbable”: André Breton’s Nadja

 Human waste and the aesthetics of the “economically nude”: Mina Loy’s Insel

Chapter Two

   Samuel Beckett’s : Human waste in

The Trilogy, Texts for Nothing, and How it I

 “[A]ll these questions of worth and value”: Partial inventories, failing bodies

“[I]n the rubbish dump”: Figurations of human waste

“[S]omewhere someone is uttering”: Dwelling and speaking in waste

Chapter Three

  Waste in Donald Barthelme, J.G Ballard, and William Gaddis

The writing of “dreck”: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

 “Things playing a more important part than people”: Ballard’s urban disaster trilogy

 “What America’s all about, waste disposal and all”: William Gaddis’ JR

   “Most of our longings go unfulfilled”:

    DeLillo’s historiographical readings of landfills and nuclear fallout

“Garbage for 20 years”

“Waste is the secret history”: Reading the past

“Longing on a large scale”: Nostalgia, collecting and waste

“ [A] form of counterhistory”: Waste and language

Conclusion

“There lies a darker narrative”: Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge                                                

“There’s always [an oil spill] happening”: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

 The future of waste

Bibliography