The End of Airports

Description

If air travel was once the bold future, it has now settled into a mundane, on-going present. We no longer expect romantic experiences or sublime views, but just hope that we get from here to there with minimal hassle. In The End of Airports, Christopher Schaberg suggests that even as the epoch of flight approaches a threshold of banality, there are still mysteries to be unraveled around our aircraft and airfields. Drawing from his own experiences working at an airport, as well as interpreting these spaces from the perspective of a cultural critic, Schaberg explores the secret lives of jet bridges, seating areas, concourses, and tarmac vehicles, showing how the ordinary objects of flight call for wonder and inquiry. The End of Airports is not an obituary-it's more like an ode to terminals in the digital age.

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English & Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011, reprinted in paperback, 2013).

...[a] well-fuelled study of air travel's fading profile in our digitally transported age. -- Nathan Heller * The New Yorker * Schaberg, an associate professor of English and Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, waxes philosophical as he contemplates the role airports play in today's society. His short essays and anecdotes draw on his years as an airport employee as well as other personal experiences. In his eyes, airports have gone from magical to mundane, enjoyable to tedious, joyful to grim. And yet his stories of working at them have traces of humor and fascination, revealing the type of behind-the-scenes knowledge that always feels a little bit exotic to the uninformed. * Publishers Weekly * The romance of flying has all but gone, replaced by convenience and an oddly whorish aesthetic, involving fusion food, kitsch art, massage chairs and, at every turn, screens that play with the relation between inside and outside, here and there. Is the modern airport a venue like a shopping mall or an out-of-town chicken ranch, Christopher Schaberg wonders in The End of Airports, or a wormhole between states? ... [Schaberg is] a very good writer, with a delicate eye for detail. ... His previous book, The Textual Life of Airports (2011), was a work of literary analysis. This one goes deeper, its tone somewhere between elegiac and apocalyptic. .... Just as Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' is easily overstated or misunderstood, so is Schaberg's thoughtful sense of the banality of modern flight. But 'end' also means purpose and, as Schaberg knows, we will still spend countless hours waiting for transport. -- Brian Morton * Times Literary Supplement * The End of Airports is an energetic meditation, replete with ethnography and metaphor. The writing is not only illuminating, it's also fun, allowing travelers the opportunity to glimpse behind the scenes at those parts of the airport-the tarmac, the break room, the luggage hold-where access is strictly forbidden. [...] I can think of no better place to read it than at an airport, waiting to board, while the dramas within pages unfold around you. -- Anya Groner * Terrain * A strong and innovative book. Tracing speculative paths around and through airports and commercial flight, The End of Airports finds new ways to think about, among other things, drones, airport/aircraft seating, weather, jet bridges, viral stories about flight, tensions with new media expectations and technologies, and seatback pockets. A fascinating read for anyone interested in airports and airplanes, but also for readers of cultural studies, media studies, and creative nonfiction. * Kathleen C. Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, USA * The golden age of air travel is over, but thanks to Schaberg the airport may become the new figure with which to think place, time, labor, leisure, organization, and communication, as well as hope, fatigue, loneliness, and desire-in other words, the most fundamental problems of life in late capitalism. In the tradition of Benjamin, Barthes, and Baudrillard, this book is theoretically incisive, intimate, pleasurable, and on time. Air travel in all of its multidimensionality, as idea and experience, but also as mood, may finally assume its rightful place in the modern psychic infrastructure. * Margret Grebowicz, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Goucher College, USA, and author of The National Park to Come * Schaberg's provocative theme implies the end of our ability to appreciate airports as bustling and forward-looking spaces....A prescient requiem for contemporary airports as abetting agents and reflectors of America's declining cultural standards. Recommended for specialists in the fields of aviation and transportation, social and intellectual history, sociological studies, media, and libraries. * Library Journal * Christopher Schaberg's The End of Airports is part memoir, part history, and part speculation. Schaberg's past as a part-time airport worker intersects with his present as a frequently flying academic researcher of airport cultures, and his experience and research inform his thoughts on the future of airports in an age of drones and instant communication. [...] The airport is both a terminal and a threshold, and Schaberg's work reminds us that travel must include pauses as well as movement. -- Rebecca Mills * Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies *