How to Save America: The Art and Culture of Hoarding

Abstract

My dissertation, "How to Save America: The Art and Culture of Hoarding," explores the fascination with junk that emerged in the mid-twentieth century by turning to artists and writers who work with found and collected material. I understand hoarding, whether or not it emerges from a pathology, as a life practice, a repeated, productive behavior of refusing to dispose that someone performs over an extended period of time. It serves as a reminder of the process by which we routinely transform objects into belongings, things into possessions, and matter into memory. I begin by narrating the story of Homer and Langley Collyer, a pair of reclusive brothers who were made famous for living and dying inside a Harlem brownstone they filled with belongings. My examination of the American interest in hoarding at once exposes patterns of consumerism and excess and reveals how a psychiatric pathology became the subject of cultural fascination. While hoarders raise questions about the value of what others would deem to be garbage, artists and writers turn disposables into a material index of consumer culture. Building on the work of a range of studies of hoarding, my project maps the various attempts to pathologize this peculiar behavior and reveals the connections among psychiatry, art, literature, and popular media. In an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, I draw on the methods of literary and cultural analysis to explore the phenomenon of hoarding.