Waste and Abundance

This is a notice for a conference to be held in Belfast next year. I post it both to broadcast and to ask about techno-scientific input. (Well, also, if anyone's ever searching for "post-modernism" at Scienceblogs, to ferret out the Continentals in the bunch, they'll find this one.)

"Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands"
The School of English, Queen's University, Belfast
17th and 18th April 2007

"Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish":
Samuel Beckett's representation of the human condition as regulated by
waste in Breath , a playlet of 1969, now reads as a striking
anticipation of our present race against ecological catastrophe. However,
if there is now a pressing need for us to re-think our attitudes towards
consumption, this change should also extend to certain aspects of our
approaches to literature, film, and critical theory. This two-day
conference entitled "Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of
Modern Wastelands" seeks to outline contexts for conceptualising
abundance and waste. It invites proposals that argue for the existence of
specific perspectives on abundance and waste in strands of modernist and
postmodernist literature as well as film. Suggested topics might include
but are not limited to the [list below].

But I wonder if we can add anymore, or debate the possibilities of the ones listed. Nothing explicitly scientific or technological here, although several themes are implicitly both scientific and technological. No biggie. Just wondering what to make of it in the most charitable light possible.

The body as cultural wasteland

Anorexic spaces (of discourse and/or in performance)

Corporeality, exhaustion, and waste

The hunger artist/ the art of hunger

Influence as recycling

Literature, critical theory, and consumption

Gender politics, abundance, and waste

Labour and deprivation

Consumption and war

Comfort and waste

Ignorance and abundance

Waste and the collectivity

The spatial economics of waste

Waste and abundance in the metropolis

Waste, abundance, and exoticism

Abundance and primitivism

The use of litter in representations of material scarcity

Waste, abundance, and the politics of the avant-garde

Time-wasting and modernity

Time, acceleration, and consumption

Globalisation and consumer angst/complacency

Abundance and Marxist theory

Shame, waste, and postcolonial theory

Negotiating abundance and waste in contemporary Ireland

Redefining the contours of ecocriticism

Go here for further information about the conference.