Francesco orlando objects

Arriving at this self-reflexive, pro positional potential we might begin to comprehend the temporal positions at stake when identifying objects of waste in sculpture and literature.

This chapter and the chapter that follows will approach these different yet intrinsically related stratum of textual waste to conclude that the significance of waste in literature cannot be reduced to one strata or another; all three play a fundamental role in how we evaluate objects within texts and how we take these things to function and perform within a literary work.

For the reasons outlined in my introduction, waste plays an essential role in our attempts to apportion, organise and regulate the world of things; objects and events of waste help us to trace and retrace the passage of objects through time. Simply because a particular object has been singled out for examination, this should not exclude the formal, material or historical conditions by which that object entered a particular work of literature.

The theoretical works that might guide us through this first level of textual waste, whereby objects of waste are described in a text, are relatively few in number. In doing so, Orlando provides a remarkable number of examples from European literature where particular kinds of objects come into view and, if it achieves nothing else, confirms the enduring presence of redundancy in literary works.

In my view, concepts of waste do not simply stand in opposition to concepts of use but represent a specific relation to or augmentation of the time we make through things. And Orlando overlooks one of the central paradoxes of waste: in works of literature, images of waste are frequently needed, purposeful and useful for communicating a whole range of meanings. Textual waste is neither absolutely terminal nor absolutely contrary to the useful time that renders it articulate.

And objects of waste do not necessarily herald a time of absolute or unequivocal nonfunctionality — what is discarded by one group or individual might be instrumental to another, things might change their function over time by becoming discarded, reused or recycled.

And, at a less pragmatic and more conceptual level, the temporal arrangement by which waste comes into being must reconcile the use that has passed and make the idea of use present at precisely the moment where it is said to have dissolved.

In other words, we cannot take for granted a polarisation between use and waste, but must, instead, seek to understand the transient co-dependence and cross-contamination of these terms.

This is as true when we confront works of sculpture and literature as it is when we confront cigarette ends found in the gutter or the refuse found at a landfill. Whilst we have discovered some flaws with one of the few works of literary criticism that has focused on the subject of waste in literature, it provides a useful departure for what follows.

The making of texts involves the production of waste, as well as references to it — a waste in both form and in content. These are some of the principles and ambitions that motivate the criticism below, loosening some of the burden of literary variety for the sake of a more thoroughgoing theory of how waste and writing intersect.

If one assumes that literature must make recourse to a material text, then the value of waste in literature resides in the relationship between its content and the textual medium.

The following chapters concentrate on the work of just two writers, T. In restricting myself to a narrow range of authors I hope to give greater room to the theoretical implications of the thesis as a whole and, in particular, to explore the ways in which we both compose and decompose meaning when assessing the effects of waste in and upon the literary.

What might be lost in not highlighting the importance of discarded things in the work of Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, Shelley, Keats and Dickens, as well as the modern and the contemporary writers with whom the concept of waste can be readily associated, [6] might be compensated by a more thorough-going and comprehensive analysis of how waste converses with the idea of the literary, the images that are created and the textual things that mediate their potential. As a literature that contemplates the leftovers of literature, the poetry of T.

Eliot has gained some of its distinction through the identification and mobilisation of waste, both as an object of writing and a critical concept used to interpret that writing. We will not begin where one might expect but, instead, with a notebook, a notebook of early poems and poetic fragments that was sold by Eliot to the patron and collector John Quinn in , as replete with vacant spaces as The Waste Land and an important source for that work.

There were a number of instances when Eliot expressed his opinion of this work. The unpublished poems in the notebook were not worth publishing. Their acquisition was announced to the general public ten years later, on the 25th October This might seem an unremarkable case of emancipated juvenilia; work the author had hoped would remain a unique and private thing emerging into the light of public scrutiny. More broadly, our readings will propel discussions about the relationships between objects and narrative.

King, Marilynne Robinson. Tues, March 1 Waste Not! Rebecca Falkoff Ph. Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture.

Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future. Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. Published June 11th by Yale University Press first published More Details Original Title.

Other Editions 5. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination.

Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Dec 14, DoctorM rated it liked it Shelves: sociology , critical-theory.

Fascinating, unpredictable, sometimes disjointed an intriguing meditation on how we convert the detritus of the past, the broken and obsolete objects of our lives, into the framework of memory.

And, yes, I do share Orlando's obsessions here. Oct 19, Kelly marked it as to-read Shelves: 20th-century-postwar-to-late , cultural-meetings , history , philosophy-theory-criticism. I am afflicted with this obsession. View 1 comment. Caterina rated it it was ok Mar 27,