The Centre for Medical Humanities is delighted to announce the publication of Leverhulme Research Fellow Dr Will Winey’s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury 2014). Readers of the CMH blog are invited to read the Introduction here and to use the discount code – GLR D3D – to get 35% off the retail price.
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Why are people so interested in what they and others throw away? This book shows how this interest in what we discard is far from new — it is integral to how we make, build and describe our lived environment. As this wide-ranging new study reveals, waste has been a polarizing topic for millennia and has been treated as a rich resource by artists, writers, philosophers and architects. Drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Bruno Latour and many others, Waste: A Philosophy of Things investigates the complexities of waste in sculpture, literature and architecture. It traces a new philosophy of things from the ancient to the modern and will be of interest to those working in cultural and literary studies, archaeology, architecture and continental philosophy.
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Reviews “This book will convince you that our most complex contemporary ideas about time are at work in the concept of waste. It draws its temporal concepts from many places, from art and literature, philosophy and cultural theory, narrative and the theory of narrative to think about the time of things – things we discard, things we used to use, things we collect, things that fall into ruin, and things that hold the future within them. It animates the theory of things and makes something beautiful out of waste.” – Mark Currie, Professor of Contemporary Literature, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
“If the primary achievement of recent civilization is to produce unprecedented heaps of garbage, what does this tell us about that civilization? In his pleasantly lucid prose style, Will Viney answers this question by providing an ontology, a sociology, and even an art criticism of waste, with special attention to the writings of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce and the visual art of Cornelia Parker and Mark Dion.” – Graham Harman, Distinguished University Professor, American University in Cairo
Dr Will Viney is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. You can read more about his work on waste here.