Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth

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.

• PrologueWhat is Literature?Moving Bodily SidewaysPerspectivism and Yiyun Li’s The VagrantsFrom Hillsdale to the SwampTeaching at the End of the WorldStarting Again with 20th-Century American FictionSomething MisplacedShopping at Walmart (with Žižek)Teaching with FilmDropped My iPhone Down BelowHumanities at the Airport Thinking SpaceAgainst Careerism, For CollegeTotal SatisfactionIn Defense of Small ThingsEnvironmental Studies, with No Limits College, It’s a MessThinking Critically about Critical ThinkingUnsettling PlaceDavid Foster Wallace: Don’t Believe the HypeMaggie Nelson’s The Argonauts: A Book Review that Is Not OneDon DeLillo’s Zero K: When Does the Person Become the Body? 30 Observations after Reading Sarah Manguso’s 300 ArgumentsLiberal Arts: A Safe Space?SabbaticalWalking It OffTrump in the Anthropocene Terminal Democracy Hunting for Morels, Finding a MessFlying Through NowhereStuckTick ThinkingDark River BalloonLandscape EcologyBack in the ClassroomEpilogueAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

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.