Contents

Contents

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 Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Something misplaced

Shopping at Walmart (with Žižek)

Teaching with film

Dropped my iPhone down below

Humanities at the airport

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?

Thirty observations after reading Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments

Liberal arts: A safe space?

Trump in the anthropocene

Terminal democracy

Hunting for morels, finding a mess

Flying through nowhere

Dark river balloon

Landscape ecology

Back in the classroom

Acknowledgments