Hoarding in the Digital Age

Wednesday, October 12, 6:30pm
Rebecca Falkoff, UC Berkley

Falkoff is currently working on a cultural history of hoarding entitled The Debris of Progress, which proposes that the contemporary invention of the hoarder reflects anxieties about the immateriality of culture in the age of digital technologies. “Hoarding in the Digital Age” will explore this hypothesis through a consideration of book collecting and/or hoarding in the context of an increasing dematerialization of the literary text.

REBECCA FALKOFF is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at UC Berkeley with a dissertation entitled After Autarchy: Male Subjectivity from Carlo Emilio Gadda to the Gruppo ’63. She has taught seminars in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature that theorize the implications of hoarding for narrative and juxtapose the contemporary hoarder with two precursors of 19th and 20th century narrative and theory: the fetishist and the collector. Descended from a long line of hoarders, Falkoff reflects on her family history as well as the popular interest in hoarding on the blog, If I Were a Hoarder.

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