If I Were a Hoarder

The Collector, the Killer, and the Capitalist

This course focuses on the collector, a figure that lurks at the fringes of late-capitalism and seems to represent at once the epitome, the inverse and even the undoing of its logics.  We begin the semester with a series of contemporary articles dedicated to collecting, storing, and hoarding objects, and to the psychic mechanisms that propel such practices and authorize distinctions between them.  

We will note the way in which collecting and its close cousin, hoarding, emerge from these texts, and from the “reality” television series Hoarders, both as means to disavow mortality and as mortal threats to the practitioners.  Next, readings from Susan Stewart’s On Longing will elicit a consideration of the mutually constitutive possibilities of objects and narrative.

We will then examine two novels, (Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Pons and E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley), a memoir, (William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing), and critical writing by Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard that figure the collector as a sort of artist whose work is formed by detaching objects from their original functions and arranging them according to idiosyncratic criteria.  The collector also appears in these texts as an archaeologist, whose acquisitions stop up the flow of history, recuperating the fragmentary debris of its blind deluge.

The final portion of the course will be dedicated to three novels and one film of the 1960s in which collecting becomes more sinister, reflecting colonialist and/or murderous desires: The Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese, The serpent by Luigi Malerba and, most markedly, The Collector by John Fowles and the eponymous film by William Wyler.

We will conclude the semester by gazing back upon the disparate collection of texts and drawing analogies between the figuration of collecting within the texts, the texts’ practice of collecting, and the juxtapositions we forge as readers and viewers.

Most of the course texts are available at the If I Were a Hoarder aStore.   

NOTE: If I have the opportunity to teach the course again, I might adapt it so as to focus more substantially on hoarding: I would probably remove Anna Maria Ortese’s The Iguana and the episode of Hoarders from the syllabus and add Randy Frost and Gail Steketee’s Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, and the independent films Possessed, by Martin Hampton, and My Mother’s Garden by Cynthia Lester.