Waste, trash, garbage, discards – these terms name the inevitable byproducts of all sorts of human activities, from making breakfast to building and maintaining cities. Waste and the question of what to do with it are the sine qua non of modern life, yet “the more waste modern societies produce, the less their members want to think about it.” Given the fundamental ecological and social importance of the problem of waste and the cognitive dissonance with which it is met in modern societies, generating ways of thinking about and paying attention to trash is a pressing concern. In this essay, I consider a potential avenue for engaging in thinking about waste as part of the overarching project of Spanish environmental cultural studies. Concretely, I will argue for the relevance of discard studies to an environmental cultural studies-centered approach to the study of Spanish literature, especially narrative fiction. Discard studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field of scholarship that focuses on hidden aspects of the production and management of material waste and its ecological and cultural implications. It offers a framework for understanding the role of waste in literature; at the same time, literature that engages with discards offers a glimpse of the cultural valences of waste and opens spaces for critical reflection on its social and environmental impacts, which is one of the key aims of discard studies. In what follows, I sketch out some of those key aims, argue for a mutually beneficial dialogue between discard studies and literary studies, and consider a concrete example of the pathways that such a dialogue can open up in Spanish literary studies.

Scholars from disciplines as varied as anthropology, environmental studies, history, and geography have paid increasing attention to the question of waste over the last three decades, generating a rich bibliography and opening up lines of inquiry that led anthropologist Robin Nagle to found the Discard Studies website (https:// discardstudies.com/) in 2010 as a space for organizing and promoting this emerging field. In the interest of brevity, I am limiting my comments on discard studies to basic information gleaned from that website, and I encourage readers to use the site as a point of departure for further inquiry. (Of particular interest is “The Dirt,” a regular feature that compiles recent waste-related publications, calls for papers, and job openings.