GERST 3514

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  • Schedule of Classes - October 31, 2025 7:07PM EDT

GERST 3514
Trash Talk: Garbage and Beauty

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

“Talking trash” usually seeks to devalue its target through pejorative language or slander. Yet it’s also a way to separate self and other, or establish order by distinguishing use and waste. When is trash a helpful byproduct? What can we learn about a society from the things it rejects or discards? How might trash become a site for philosophy and art, and if it can be viewed as beautiful, should it be? This seminar explores poetic and popular “trash talk” that employs metaphors about garbage, its landscapes (landfills, wastelands), and its cognates (excess, abject, refuse, waste) to investigate what values and alternatives arise from the parts of society deemed unvaluable and the parts of life determined unviable. Taught in English.


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Syllabi: none

  •   Regular Academic Session.  Combined with: SHUM 3514

  • 3 Credits Graded

  •  8961 GERST 3514   SEM 101

  •  
    • MW
    • Jan 20 - May 5, 2026

    • Nousek, K

  • Instruction Mode: In Person

    This course can be applied to the Minor in European Studies.