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Waste by Mind Map: Waste

1. Introduction

1.1. omnipresence of stuff, waste, recurrence of dumps, gravel pits… in Munro's stories. interrogates the role and meaning of these objects in characters' lives, as part of an overall ontology and phenomenology. Questions our relationship to our environmnent, how we relate to it in daily lives, asks in what ways it makes us happy, or can make us happy.

1.2. AM's interest in houses, home, place, nature. But not in political terms: not a mother nature figure (as in ecofeminism of the 1970s, revived now), not anti/postcolonial, not anti-patriarchy, not an environmental activist. An observer and a recorder, always with a view to self-knowledge. "A watcher, not a keeper." (Miles City, Montana" (88). Relation between the self and the outside world, in ontological (philosophical) terms, in terms of presence in the world. Almost a faith in nature, or a kind of spirituality.

1.2.1. interview on how nature came to replace religion?

1.3. §3) Waste (objects and/in landscape) as a sign of desire and time: discarded object after desire has gone (Thill). 'Diversion' (Appadurai)

1.4. Happiness and place / oikos / ecumene: human, ecological and physical environments

2. 2) the economy of desire

2.1. "White Dump"= excessive desire

2.2. "Material": women vs. men; care vs public light / mess

3. 1) old objects & stuff

3.1. theoretical framework: Thill, Bauman

3.2. Munro not an ecofeminist in the 1970s

3.3. 'Walker Brothers Cowboy': old cars = nostalgia + pollution of consumer culture

3.4. 'What Do You Want to Know For?' = car-wrecking operation

3.5. "The Shining Houses": old junk in Mrs H"s house = her life / a question of aesthetic

3.6. "Wood": plastic = pollution vs. diversion (Appadurai)

3.7. "Home" (290): the attachment to place; not wasted material; sandals = closeness to nature # working the land > different viewpoint, no romantic view of the country vs. father on junk, no use for it > generational difference // writer's material

4. 3) the poetical ecology of waste

4.1. Munro not an environmentalist in the 2000s

4.2. 'Walker Brothers Cowboy': formation of the lake > sense & scale of time + change of times;

4.3. 'What Do You Want to Know For?': geological landscape and death.

5. Conclusion

5.1. Nobel Prizes against tar sands