Trash Talk: Garbage and Beauty

Catalog description

“Talking trash” usually seeks to devalue its target through pejorative language or slander. Yet it’s also a way to separate self and other, or establish order by distinguishing use and waste. When is trash a helpful byproduct? What can we learn about a society from the things it rejects or discards? How might trash become a site for philosophy and art, and if it can be viewed as beautiful, should it be? This seminar explores poetic and popular “trash talk” that employs metaphors about garbage, its landscapes (landfills, wastelands), and its cognates (excess, abject, refuse, waste) to investigate what values and alternatives arise from the parts of society deemed unvaluable and the parts of life determined unviable. Taught in English.