“Welcome to America 2.0”: Reading Waste in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s celebrated novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), a text that straddles the dystopian and the satiric in its depiction of a quasi- contemporary America, from the perspective of Waste Studies. Through the problematic relationship between its two main characters, Shteyngart’s novel articulates the wide-ranging effects of globalization on a generationally-ruptured American society, that in many ways stands also for the First World at large. Drawing from sociologists, cultural critics, and phi- losophers like Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Byung-Chul Han, John Scanlan and Susan Sontag, who have theorized how individuals today are molded, challenged and threatened by powerful extrinsic forces in the era of globalization, this article aims to explore how Super Sad True Love Story showcases a range of mutually interrelated “modes of waste,” resulting from the writer’s pushing to a satiric/dystopic extreme contemporary American practices in politics and finance, citizenship and social ethics, culture and language, and even biological research.

This article proposes a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s celebrated novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), a text that straddles the dystopian and the satiric in its depiction of a quasi- contemporary America, from the perspective of Waste Studies. Through the problematic

relationship between its two main characters, Shteyngart’s novel articulates the wide-ranging effects of globalization on a generationally-ruptured American society, that in many ways stands also for the First World at large. Drawing from sociologists, cultural critics, and phi- losophers like Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Byung-Chul Han, John Scanlan and Susan

Sontag, who have theorized how individuals today are molded, challenged and threatened by powerful extrinsic forces in the era of globalization, this article aims to explore how Super Sad True Love Story showcases a range of mutually interrelated “modes of waste,” resulting from the writer’s pushing to a satiric/dystopic extreme contemporary American practices in politics and finance, citizenship and social ethics, culture and language, and even biological research.