The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth

by Christopher Schaberg

Overview

A 2019 Prose Award Finalist

What is the role of literary studies in an age of Twitter threads and viral news?

If the study of literature today is not just about turning to classic texts with age-old questions, neither is it a rejection of close reading or critical inquiry. Through the lived experience of a humanities professor in a rapidly changing world, this book explores how the careful study of literature and culture may be precisely what we need to navigate our dizzying epoch of post-truth politics and ecological urgency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501334290
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/26/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2013), The End of Airports (2015), and Airportness (2017), as well as co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014), all published by Bloomsbury. His writing has appeared in, among other publications, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, The Los Angeles Review of Books, 3: AM Magazine, Public Books, and The New Inquiry

Table of Contents

Prologue

What is Literature?
Moving Bodily Sideways
Perspectivism and Yiyun Li's The Vagrants
From Hillsdale to the Swamp
Teaching at the End of the World
Starting Again with 20th-Century American Fiction
Something Misplaced
Shopping at Walmart (with Žižek)
Teaching with Film
Dropped My iPhone Down Below
Humanities at the Airport
Thinking Space
Against Careerism, For College
Total Satisfaction
In Defense of Small Things
Environmental Studies, with No Limits
College, It's a Mess
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
Unsettling Place
David Foster Wallace: Don't Believe the Hype
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts: A Book Review that Is Not One
Don DeLillo's Zero K: When Does the Person Become the Body?
30 Observations after reading Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments
Liberal Arts: A Safe Space?
Sabbatical
Walking it Off
Trump in the Anthropocene
Terminal Democracy
Hunting for Morels, Finding a Mess
Flying Through Nowhere
Stuck
Tick Thinking
Dark River Balloon
Landscape Ecology
Back in the Classroom

Epilogue
Index

Editorial Reviews

05/28/2018
Schaberg (Airportness), a Loyola professor of literature and environmental theory, devotes this thoughtful but frustratingly inconclusive essay collection to investigating “what it means to be interested in literature and... to teach literature at the college level, in an age of post-truth.” Pursuing the question, Schaberg takes readers to various locations, allowing them to eavesdrop on his thoughts. His activities include “reading” the Mississippi by cataloging its debris; driving the philosopher Slavoj iek, in town for an academic conference, to a Walmart; and recalling his college years, all with ruminations on teaching literature woven in. Touchstones throughout these essays include airports (“foretold sites of vulnerability and inevitable chaos”) and writer David Foster Wallace. Schaberg soars when talking about language: for example, should Americans really want to “drain the swamp,” he asks about the Republican campaign promise, when swamps are diverse ecosystems vital to life on Earth? Like Virginia Woolf, whom he invokes, Schaberg wants to connect literature, place, and the mundane to larger social issues, but these meandering essays lack Woolf’s driving force. Schaberg’s knowledge of literature and environmental issues can’t be faulted, but his reflective writing doesn’t pull this book’s various concerns into a cohesive whole. (July)

Publishers Weekly

An urgent and searching reappraisal of what it means to read and to teach literature in this post-truth context ... [Schaberg's] slim and highly readable book is the product of a teacher's attempt to become re-enchanted with his trade ... It is candid and relaxed, and full of insight, as well as Schaberg's enthusiasm for and anxieties about literature and literary studies today.
Times Higher Education

Beginning with his own years as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college in Michigan, Schaberg traverses time and space considering his pursuits as a teacher and a scholar, and as a citizen while on sabbatical. Key among Schaberg's present concerns is how to decide on texts in a Trumpian world, and whether the lens through which such pedagogic choices are made has been permanently altered. Interspersing the narrative with mushroom hunting in northern Michigan and playground meandering with his young son, Schaberg takes the reader along for an unpredictable and, at times, humorous semantic ride. The book reveals Schaberg's genuine concern for the future of his students-and all students, be they of the academy or of the world.
CHOICE

Schaberg finds plenty of reasons to worry in his new book [...] But he also sees reasons why literary study is more important than ever.
Inside Higher Ed

From the Publisher