This book has meandered over a wide range of subjects—moving from literary passages to daily walks, from wilderness adventures to academic musings, and from questions of ecology to the in-between realms of air travel.
How is this all captured under the gauze of the work of literature? It is something of a network. For me this book has been a way to account for the recurrent things that I think about and work on in proximity to literature. I teach college courses on literary texts and writing, and my interests beyond the classroom filter back into this space and shape what I teach and write about. So my classes—within my thankfully fuzzy home discipline of English—have come to include airports, contemporary culture, and environmental thought. And, in turn, my students push me to reconsider my own attachments to these extraliterary things and activities—and so I approach them afresh.
In this age of post-truth, when narratives move disturbingly fast and can be warped to disgusting political ends with grave implications on the ground, traditional literature and the skills that come with it might seem aloof, quaint, even obsolete. But these things are more important than ever: being able to read slowly, to carefully consider how narratives are fabricated, produced, disseminated, and consumed—and the weight (if not exactly truth) that people give these narratives, for however long or quickly. These considerations have to be informed by broader interests, by a wider world of things. If there is an upshot to dwelling in an age of post-truth, it might mean that we can traverse hard distinctions, undo borders, and, to put it simply, be more creative.
The work of literature right now is about including more material in our canons and discussions, about fanning out into the world. I try to do this in my teaching, and I’ve attempted something like this here in these pages. This book is about how my interests have incubated, developed, intersected, dispersed, and lingered over many years—all the while intermingled with the teaching of literature.Oftentimes one’s scholarly expertise can be understood as strictly academic—that is, not translating to daily life. This book has been my endeavor to push against this, to show how myriad objects of curiosity comingle, on campus as well as in terminals and along riverbanks. This book is hardly a neat and tidy model, and it doesn’t exactly have a heuristic function. Nevertheless, I hope it inspires others to weave together their interests in and out of the classroom, and to follow them over many years. The work of literature is a long game (even allowing that “game” is not a great metaphor). The contents of this book have been drawn from eight years of teaching at Loyola, living in New Orleans, traveling, parenting, writing, reflecting on higher education, spending time in the north woods of my childhood home, and getting back into the classroom.
Our age of post-truth is also an age of rabid compartmentalization, where people’s beliefs, aesthetics, consumer habits, transportation modes, and politics are all too frequently cordoned off from one another. We need to push against this, to make connections: which is not the same as saying simply and with a shrug that “everything is connected.” The work of literature can risk totalizing: think of how a novel can conjure a whole world, and how literary lessons can be recklessly interpreted to be universal. But the work of literature might also present ways to think across different things—if not to totalize, then to see amalgams, disjunctions, and murky areas of overlap and co-shaping. And to see these things as at once personal and collective, both sweeping across the planet and taking shape in local sites at each instant.
I felt the need to write a few words by way of conclusion, about how this book’s heterogeneous contents interact—or at least, how I see them interacting in my mind, especially as I find myself back in the classroom in this perplexing time. The work of literature in an age of post-truth goes way beyond the book, past readers and writers and into and through the world all around. And I don’t mean this to sound like an impossibly capacious definition. Rather, it means that nothing is off limits. It’s a place to start from again and again, without a foreseeable end.