Mark Goble uses the concept of convergence to explore the implications of formal and temporal compression, economy, and slowness in an age of unprecedented expansion and speedup. Richard McGuire’s Here presents an extreme example of spatial restriction and temporal expansion, while novels by Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson juxtapose ecological, scientific, technological, and theological timespans to human ones in ways that echo postmodern and science fiction precursors, but with very different aims and warnings in mind for denizens of the Anthropocene.

The history of waste records a relationship that has altered over time, resulting in various literal and symbolic manifestations. Waste Studies crosses conventional disciplines to offer ethical frameworks which pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste. With examples from novelists Toni Morrison and Wolfgang Hilbig, this chapter illustrates a number of aspects of waste in literature: waste as material agent; waste as metaphor; and narratives structured as waste, with little hope for clarity. The strategy of slow practice through narrative construction can prove a means to inculcate an ecological sensitivity and awareness we carry with us beyond the act of reading. While waste categories often are used to dismiss, deny, and reject certain humans, other-than-human agents, and material items, waste has also been used as a means to provoke compassion and ethical engagement by which we can develop a compassionate commonality with wasted beings to act for them, for us, and for the world. Waste Studies argues that the humanities can vibrantly and dynamically work to improve all of our lives in a concrete and material way.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is a notoriously ambivalent book, seeming at once politically radical and conservative in its social vision. Rather than dismissing these contradictions, this chapter examines the work performed by literary vagueness as it relates to a crucial concept that runs through Steinbeck’s writing: the process of emergence, the formation of wholes from component parts, which we see in analyses of Steinbeck’s construction of character, his slow descriptions of people and things, and his metafictional self-consciousness of the act of writing. Turning to the social philosophy of the novel, the chapter relates its faltering quality of thought--its failed attempt to articulate its ideas--to a developing understanding of the public sphere defined by false opinions and vulnerable to propaganda. The novel’s vagueness, in which ideas are always emerging but never fully forming, explains the book’s appeal to different political viewpoints. The novel’s partial self-understanding also explains Steinbeck’s failure to imagine nonwhite laborers in the California fields, as well as the jarring quality of the book’s final scene, whose power to imagine a public relationship between strangers depends on its provocative incompletion.