Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”

Climate change, I argue, is a catastrophe that resists the revelation promised by apocalyptic narrative. My case study is William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), which I situate in two climatic contexts: the year of its composition, which saw meteorological extremes caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and an era of geologic modernity, the Anthropocene, which commenced with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century. As volcanogenic haze migrates in Cowper's descriptions from the countryside to the greenhouse and the imperial city, the poet fails to identify a meteorology with which to distinguish nature's seasonal “revolvency” from eschatological presages or from the modernization process itself—the historical “revolution” embodied by worsening urban pollution. Climate change poses a crisis, in the dual etymological senses of a decision and a turning point, because it unsettles the duration of the present, what returns and endures and so measures alteration.

In this essay, I take A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene as case studies that show how critical commonplaces may become so entrenched that they limit the horizons of what we can see in a given text, genre, or period. The essay has two purposes. The first is theoretical. I aim to make explicit the often unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) theoretical subtexts that have shaped readings of female sexuality, and I propose some historical reasons for the dominance of certain strains of feminism—those best known as “subordination feminism” and “cultural feminism”—in criticism of early modern literature. The second purpose is hermeneutic. I explore the alternative readings that become available if we approach Shakespeare's and Spenser's work through the lens of one competing strand of feminist thought, described by its practitioners as “prosex” or “sex-radical” feminism. In this essay, my reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene limits its interpretive frameworks to those offered by sex-radical feminism and the strands of queer theory that emerged from it. Drawing on these often overlooked frameworks, I explore the tensions and hierarchies among women in the play and the poem to challenge the assumption that women's relationships are always egalitarian and nurturing; I propose that homo- and heteroerotic desires are not mutually exclusive but may coexist in these works; and I argue that female masochism is not always a pathology that enables patriarchy but can be a legitimate form of desire that challenges traditional ideas of normal and proper female behavior.

Despite their tendency to metaphorize and disembody blindness, the sighted have used it to represent the body's experience of coming to knowledge in a world of things. The vibrant intensity of the attachment to things in Victorian literature makes this writing a rich site for exploring the way represented blindness comes to figure what a body articulated by materiality knows and does not know of itself and of the world. Reading works by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others, this essay accounts for an impious strain in representations of blindness and examines how the Victorian literary imagination of blindness evinces a palpable desire for it, grounded in the fantasy that it permits enviable access to a way of knowing and experiencing things from among them rather than from the abstracting distance imposed by sight. Alongside its imagination of the buffeting distress of thingly encounters, blindness envy fantasizes an aesthetics of disorientation and surprise.

This essay charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” in contemporary American culture: skilled laborers who confront the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the accompanying sense of labor's marginality in American society. Although they are alienated from sites of industrial productivity, rugged consumers find alternative means of practicing their skills by creatively misusing, repairing, and repurposing the commodities in their environments. At the same time, they ennoble such actions by modeling them on the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism. Whether in literature or in the broader culture, American rugged consumers thus mediate between the mythic models of self-sufficiency celebrated by the country's older, frontier capitalism and the postindustrial realities of the present. The essay posits four provisional categories of rugged consumerism, ranging from the hypermasculine weaponization of unlikely objects to the (re)creation of environmentally sustainable interior designs.

In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text's morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her.

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future

takes shape

too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving

—Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”

Conserving This, Conserving That

Just a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70).

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.

Any discussion of how the humanities can contribute to sustainability or how the humanities are sustainable must begin with what critics of the sustainability concept have called its cultural deficit: academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of what sustainability is and might be. Sustainability is most commonly understood in economic terms, as production that respects ecological carrying capacities. Because the sustainability concept is “squishy,” in Bill McKibben's words, it invariably drifts toward the more pragmatic project of sustainable development, the goal of which is keeping modernization viable—a goal dubious to many environmentalists as well as to cultural critics (102). In an era when the rhetoric of crisis dominates public conversation about political, social, educational, and environmental affairs, the term sustainability can seem anemic. Its emphasis on long-term planning and stewarding of resources has none of the dramatic appeal of apocalyptic visions of a world in which all human and natural ecologies are in collapse. For many environmental critics, it is a term that in some sense fails to account for the necessity of drastic changes in how resources are protected, much less distributed, and it relies too heavily on protecting the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the first place. For its critics, and even for its reluctant supporters, it is a term about managing anxieties that shuttle between local and global concerns, individual and corporate responsibilities.

Particularly because the mla lacks a division on environmental literature, it is gratifying that the organization is turning attention to environmental studies through forums such as this one. Many more in the profession than the fourteen hundred members of the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment take some interest in environmental literature and would like to foster sustainability through their teaching or research. Yet the term is problematic: a popular buzzword, its parameters are vague, and consequently the more difficult questions underlying the concept are too easily evaded. Sustainability of what and for whom? we might ask. Are people talking about sustaining complicated, interwoven biotic communities, sustaining humankind, or sustaining a comfortable lifestyle currently enjoyed by the privileged classes around the globe? What are the term's qualitative implications? What constitute appropriate standards for sustainability, and who decides? What political and economic policies will be necessary? Where will we get the motivation, the will to institute them? Where does sustainability intersect with issues of environmental and social justice, and how will we address the many ethical questions it raises?

It seemed like a good idea while it lasted, but we should have known it could not last. the era of sustainability is over. behind our shared cultural narratives of sustainability sits a fantasy about stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow. It's been pretty to think so, but it's never been so. In literary studies, we name this kind of fantasy pastoral. Such a narrative imagines a happy, stable relation between human beings and the nonhuman environment. It seldom rains, mud doesn't clog our panpipes, and our sheep never run away while swains sing beautiful songs to coy shepherdesses. In this sustainable green world, complicated things fit into simple packages, as literary criticism has recognized, from William Empson's “pastoral trick” (115) to Greg Gerrard's “pastoral ecology” (56–58). This green vision provides, in Gerrard's phrase, a “stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56). That's the dream toward which sustainability entices us. To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details. That's not the human experience of the nonhuman world. Remember the feeling of being wet, like King Lear, “to the skin” (Mentz, “Strange Weather”). Changing scale matters, and local variation does not preclude global consistency, but the feeling of the world on our skin is disruptive. Our environment changes constantly, unexpectedly, often painfully.

In december 1968 the journal science published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.1 According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with his livestock. As each greed-driven individual strives to maximize the resource for personal gain, the commons collapses to the detriment of all. Together, Hardin's pithy essay title and succinct parable have helped vindicate a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby privatization through enclosure, dispossession, and resource capture is deemed necessary for averting tragedy.

Kawsay in Colonial and Postcolonial Borderlands

The personage of Huatya Curi, the “Baked Potato Gleaner,” figured prominently in an early colonial account of the landscape and religious mythology of the Andean people of Huarochirí, a province in the mountainous interior of Lima in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Huarochirí manuscript, a sixteenth-century Quechua document, introduces Huatya Curi with these words: “Chay pacha cay huatya curi ñisca huacchalla micuspapas huatya cuspalla causaptinsi sutiachircan huatya curim ñispa …” ‘At that time Huatya Curi, a poor potato eater, was accustomed to living from gleaning baked potatoes, and for that reason people named him Huatya Curi …‘ (Salomon and Urioste 163; my trans.; see also Taylor 32–33). While poor, Huatya Curi was powerful; in the same passage he goes on to vanquish a mighty Andean lord, Tamta Ñamca. The demise of Tamta Ñamca sets the stage for the ascendance of Paria Caca, Huatya Curi's father, who emerges as the chief Andean deity. Huatya Curi's existence is earthly yet linked to his supernatural lineage.

The classic anthology The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, was the first of its kind to bring together an array of scholarship that focused on a relatively unrecognized field of study: ecocriticism. This singular publication was the brainchild of Glotfelty, who worked with Fromm to produce a collection that stands at the gates of our contemporary era as a harbinger of the significant criticism and curricula that would shape literary studies in English departments across the country. The Ecocriticism Reader accompanied a new wave of interest in the field as seen in contemporaneous publications such as Karl Kroeber's Ecological Literary Criticism (1994) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995).