The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight

Introduction: A Book About Airports 1. What is Airport Reading? 2. Work in the Culture of Flight 3. Detecting the Uncertain Subject of Airport Mysteries 4. 9/11: Points of Departure 5. The Airport Screening Complex 6. Airport Studies: Creative Acts and Critical Thinking 7. Ecology in Waiting: Airport Passages and Environmental Imagination 8. Bird Citing 9. Claiming Baggage Conclusion Bibliography Index

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