On the Uses of Waste

Abstract

For the past few years, waste has become an increasingly popular topic among literary scholars. The sheer volume of areas of knowledge involved in this highly interdisciplinary field has been somehow blurred as the labels “Waste Studies” and “Waste Theory” gained traction. Nevertheless, upon closer inspection those terms crumble easily. What is “Waste Theory”? What attempts, if any, have been made to agglutinate these disparage fields and their corresponding contributions into a cohesive discipline of its own? This paper aims to shed light on these questions by reviewing some of the most referenced works and authors within the burgeoning waste scholarship. Likewise, it seeks to critically examine whether it would be possible–and productive–to elaborate a general theory of waste.