Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture

Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t analyzes post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of human waste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmental racism, and militarism. Primarily examining postmodern parody, the book shows the value of aesthetic renderings of sanitary engineering for composting ideologies that fuel a ruinous impact on the world. Drawing on late twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, and Leo Bersani, American Sh*t shows the continued relevance of psychoanalytic interpretations of contemporary fiction for understanding post-45 authors’ engagement with waste. Ultimately, the monograph reveals how novelists Ishmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Samuel R. Delany critique subjects who abnegate their status as waste-producing beings and bring readers back to embrace

Winner of the 2019 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award for Literary Criticism of English Language Literature

“Foltz’s study of human waste in Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, and Samuel Delany convincingly demonstrates their scatological games to be premised on contesting psychoanalytic theory’s complicity in the upholding of white hegemony, heteronormativity, and patriarchal imperialism. American Sh*t is a valuable intervention into a field that has been too quick to relegate psychoanalysis to the “scrap heap”—and a compelling example of what literary analysis that circumvents the strictures of category and genre can achieve.” (Dr. Rachele Dini, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, UK)

“Although Foltz's scatological subject might initially strike some readers as repugnant, I would implore anyone interested in contemporary American literature and/or pop-culture to put aside any squeamishness and engage with the book's compelling and timely observations. Her refreshingly unorthodox and, at times irreverent, approach to the material at hand is both entirely appropriate and thought-provoking.” (Derek C. Maus, State University of New York at Potsdam, USA, author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (2019) and Understanding Colson Whitehead (2014))

Mary C. Foltz is Associate Professor of English, American Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University, USA. Her research and teaching focus upon post-1945 U.S. fiction, queer fiction and theory, waste studies, and environmental literary criticism.