University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher Melissa Dunlany University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Dunlany, Melissa, "The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2264. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2264 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2264 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Aesthetics of Waste: Michel Tournier, Agnes Varda, Sabine Macher Abstract In this dissertation, I engage with authors and works that sweep waste to the center, destabilizing our expectations of what waste is, and what it does. They do so through an aesthetics of waste that foregrounds waste as a major theme and mode of artistic creation. By waste, I refer to the wide material and metaphorical implications of the word – from trash, refuse and excrement, to textual debris that would typically be discarded from a finished work of art. My corpus is composed of contemporary French works and spans the genres of novel, film and poetic notebook. It begins with a trash-centered reading of Michel Tournier’s Les M�t�ores (1975), before moving on to Agn�s Varda’s documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000) and a selection of Sabine Macher’s poetic notebooks (1992 – 2005). Through these works, my dissertation interrogates the relationship between writing (�criture and cin�criture) and waste.