The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight

Description

This is a book about airport stories. It is about common narratives of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports-the strange or hidden narratives that do not always fit into standard ideas of these in-between places. Tales of near disaster, endless delays, dramatic weather shifts, a lost bag that suddenly appears-such stories are familiar accounts of a place that seems to thrive on and recycle its own mythologies. The Textual Life of Airports shows how airports demand to be read. Working at the intersection of literary studies and cultural theory, Schaberg tracks airport stories in American literature, as well as in a range of visual texts (film, airport art, magazine illustrations). It accounts for how airports appear in literature throughout the twentieth-century, while also examining the influx of airport figures in markedly post-9/11 literature and culture. These literary and cultural representations work together to form "the textual life of airports."

Christopher Schaberg is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory, Department of English, Loyola University New Orleans, USA.

"For most of us, time spent in airports is filled with inconvenience, discomfort, and often explicit insult to our psychological well-being. Reading Christopher Schaberg's The Textual Life of Airports is guaranteed to dispel your tedium and inspire you to join along with him in a rich foray of cultural inquiries about these colossi and the complex narratives they convey. From the canon of airport reading to aesthetic images of baggage, from the resonances of 9/11 to the semiotic absence and presence of birds in the terminals, Schaberg approaches airports with a keen critical energy that will make you welcome your next four-hour layover in Atlanta or your missed connection in Newark as an opportunity to explore his fascinating insights. I have sometimes felt that all the good topics in cultural studies have been exhausted; this book restores my faith that fertile ground remains. I savored every paragraph." -- Randy Malamud, Professor of English, Georgia State University, USA, and author of Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (Macmillan and NYU Press, 1998) and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Palgrave 2003). "From The Hardy Boys to Don DeLillo, from early aviation to 9/11 and after, The Textual Life of Airports explores that most quotidian space of ennui-the airport--to argue that it is a complex contact zone of travelers and workers, readers and screeners. In this lively, erudite, and elegantly written book, this place shaped by hard architecture and ambient music becomes transformed from an epicenter of dread and boredom to a site of intense inquiry, a place in which we might even wish to linger." -- Caren Kaplan, Professor in American Studies, University of California, Davis, USA, and author of Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke University Press, 1996). "The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Masterpiece Theatre host Russell Wayne Baker once lamented that the public imagines reading poetry to be worse than carrying heavy luggage through Chicago's O'Hare airport. In The Textual Life of Airports, Christopher Schaberg offers a shrewd response: the airport is the poetry." -- Ian Bogost, Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Air travel has been a defining characteristic in modern life in the 20th century, but as Internet technologies allow us to symbolically traverse space from our home office and the actual process of transporting our bodies across great distances becomes more onerous, it's unclear what its role will be in the 21st. For this reason, Schaberg's study of airports is timely, and his insistence on examining them as 'texts' beyond their mere functions provides a platform from which a larger study of airports-and other apparent 'non-places'-as environments or objects can and should be built. -- Nathan C. Martin * Press-Street.com * [O]ne of the striking virtues of the book is that it introduces readers to a wide array of flight literature by authors who are part of the environmental canon, but whom we may not associate with the supermodern, highly mediated site of the airport-e.g. Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, and Annie Proulx. In doing so, [Schaberg] reminds us that travel and transport networks are central to the study of literature and the environment. -- Marit MacArthur, California State University, Bakersfield * Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment * In a play on the double meaning of 'airport-reading' - both as the undemanding reading that helps pass time in airports and as the reading of airports themselves - The textual life of airports sets out to explore its subject in terms of the co-shapings, enfoldings and complicities of site and text.... The overall effect of the book is reminiscent of Escher's pictures - such as Drawing Hands (1946) - in which figure and ground are always redrawing each other: airport writing and writing the airport. The textual life of airports should, I suggest, be of interest not only to students of cultural studies (Schaberg's main target audience), but to all those interested in the day-to-day accomplishment of 'grammatocentric' (Hoskin & Macve, 1994) organization. * Organization Studies * Schaberg teaches literature, at Loyola University, in New Orleans, but he used to work at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, and his interest in the culture of flight arises from years spent on the tarmac and at the check-in desk. Schaberg's first book, The Textual Life of Airports (2011), explained how the airport mythologized and subverted air travel for passengers. That work emerged from his dissertation, and it followed a style of feverish pop-cultural close reading strangely valued in some academic quarters. It sometimes seemed a touch insane. -- Nathan Heller * The New Yorker *