Exploring "the rhetorical symbolism of poop in Western culture."

Using the absurd to confront the abject. Also, an old lady poops herself.

An early-semester update from the most important college course in American history.

The ivory tower meets the porcelain throne.

An excerpt from the introduction to an anthology about the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic troupe, provoked by what its editors perceive as the academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe.

This paper analyzes PoopReport.com in a framework that connects the study of scatalogical cultural texts to an environmental perspective. This paper argues against the ways cultural theorists have tended to interpret scatological literature, film, art, etc., and uses PoopReport as a test case for the author's preferred mode of scatalogical cultural criticism: green-brown.

When it was written in 1891, Scatalogic Rites was accepted as an ethnographic catalog of rituals involving human waste. In 1993, it was trimmed down to short, pithy excerpts and renamed The Portable Scatalog. The essay juxtaposes the 1890s with contemporary culture, and discusses why and how discourse of shit has been restricted to the medium of the joke.

The author is a graduate student in the Cultural Studies PhD program at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation topic is shit. In this essay, she attempts to reconcile these two facts while explaining the mysteries of the academic discipline that is -- or, at least, soon will be -- SCATOLOGY.

This paper analyzes the role of shit in Stephen King's bestselling novel It in order to argue for the legitimacy of scatological criticism -- shit crit, for short. The dynamics of the novel demonstrate the political power of King's status as both a teller of scatalogical tales and an author of shitty talent in the eyes of literary critics. In his refusal to refuse shit, this paper argues, King critiques the historical and cultural forces that have contributed to a notion of consciousness that exists at the expense our acknowledgment of human corporeality and mortality.