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Narrative, Nature, Society: The Network of Waste in Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche

Lucy Bell
- 01 Oct 2015 - 
- Vol. 110, Iss: 4, pp 1045
TLDR
The authors argued that waste not only fulfils a narrative function, but also constitutes what Bruno Latour terms a network, a web of interactions between discursive, natural and social processes.
Abstract
Refuse is a key theme, image and structural device in the Spanish-Argentine writer Andres Neuman’s novel Bariloche (1999), whose protagonist is a waste collector in Buenos Aires. My contention, though, is that waste not only fulfils a narrative function, but in fact constitutes what Bruno Latour terms a ‘network’, a web of interactions between discursive, natural and social processes. Bringing together close literary analysis with insights from environmental criticism (Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett) and sociology (Zygmunt Bauman and Martin O’Brien), this paper reveals the complex interactions between the human and non-human world in the novel’s urban setting.

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References
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Book

We Have Never Been Modern

Bruno Latour
TL;DR: This article argued that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology, which allowed the formidable expansion of the Western empires.
Book

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that political ecology has to let go of nature first, get out of the cave and return to civil peace, and that the notion of fact and value is a limitation of the power of the Bicameral Collective.
Book

Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

Stacy Alaimo
TL;DR: In this paper, the science, culture, and politics of multiple chemical sensitivity have been discussed in the context of posthuman environmental ethics in recent science fiction novels, including Deviant Agents and Invisible Matters.
Book

The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination

TL;DR: The Emergence of Environmental Criticism as mentioned in this paper The World, the Text, and the Ecocritic is a seminal work in the field of environmental criticism, focusing on space, place and imagination from local to global.
Book

A Crisis of Waste?: Understanding the Rubbish Society

TL;DR: Rubbish Society: Rubbish Histories as discussed by the authors is a collection of historical documents about rubbish and its use in various aspects in the world, such as: 1. Rubbish History, 2.Rubbish Literatures, 3. Rubbings, 4.Rubbings Industries, 5. Rubbed Households, 6. Rubbage Relationships, 7. Rubbinned Idealism 7.