The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth

Christopher Schaberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501334313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

A 2019 Prose Award Finalist What is the role of literary studies in an age of Twitter threads and viral news? If the study of literature today is not just about turning to classic texts with age-old questions, neither is it a rejection of close reading or critical inquiry. Through the lived experience of a humanities professor in a rapidly changing world, this book explores how the careful study of literature and culture may be precisely what we need to navigate our dizzying epoch of post-truth politics and ecological urgency.

Prologue

A few years before writing this book, I might have celebrated the idea of arriving at an age of “post-truth.” In some ways, it sounds like a fundamental goal of literary studies: how readers learn to linger in and learn from uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox. These are fruitful things in the literature classroom—as well as for the thinker, writer, or artist more broadly. To be suspicious of truth, in this sense, is to be wary of Truth with a capital “T”: definitive or absolute claims that, in truth, are more nuanced and complex, more loaded with history. Such claims to Truth are usually in the service of an interest, a very subjective vector of power that is claimed to be ahistorical, universal. Careful study of rhetoric and context often reveals claims of Truth to be riddled with contradiction or indeterminacy. So getting to a place of post-truth may have sounded like a worthwhile venture, not so long ago.

But post-truth means something more sinister these days.

“Post-truth” was designated as 2016’s word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary. It is a concept that became vivid during the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, but it is something that had been creeping and building for a while. To say that we’re in an age of post-truth is to suggest that this something has now crystalized and become glaringly apparent. This is the age when what is truthfully stated or factually reported can be dismissed as “just words”—as Donald Trump put it in his first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. And by merely retorting that something is not true, any further inquiry is halted. Or, conversely, by claiming something patently untrue, one can nevertheless sow belief in such a form that floats freely away from actual life.

This is the age when grand narratives of progress are trembling at the brink, and when atavism is running rampant. It’s the milieu when Friedrich Nietzsche’s once-radical arguments about the slipperiness of truths and the prismatic nature of perspectives become part of mainstream thought and culture (if in garbled and often misappropriated snippets). “That’s just, like, your opinion, man”—so sneered Jeff Bridges’s character Jeff Lebowski in the early 1990s, in the Coen brothers’ cult film The Big Lebowski (1998). Now those words sound less laughable, as they’ve been deployed on a mass scale—anyone can claim this, and not even with irony. Climate change? Rising economic inequities? Structural racism? Erosion of civil liberties? Illegal collusions? Out-of-control gun violence? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

In this atmosphere, how might literature be of help? Doesn’t any work of literature—much less literary studies—open the floodgates to endless interpretation, with no firm foundations to fall back on? When stories can go viral so quickly, with ruthless efficiency—regardless of their truth-value—of what use is the slower, clumsier process of liberal arts education, in which literature and literary studies (still) struggle to thrive?

I want to say that literature is something sure to hold onto in the choppy seas of post-truth, amid the swift currents of viral news. But this is strange to say, because some of the best literature unmoors, even as it grips the reader. This book is about what it means to be interested in literature and what it means to teach literature at the college level, in an age of post-truth.

This book is also about the connections between literature and environment, and about writing and teaching with place in mind. Part of the work of literature, I want to argue, is locating firm footing in the wild rapids of this time. I’m using environmental language here deliberately, and I will return to questions of regional belonging and the aesthetics and ethics of place, throughout. While I primarily teach literature, my interests usually drift toward questions of ecology, and attunement to coexistence in ecosystems.

I put this book together while on sabbatical, up in Michigan. I was taking a year away from Loyola University New Orleans in order to finish another book (Airportness: The Nature of Flight), but during this time I was also reflecting on my work as a whole, and on the value and functions of what I do—in the classroom, in my office hours, on my campus, and thinking and writing in the dark of night. I was also reconnecting with the place where I grew up, a place that I love. I thought that during my sabbatical I was going to work on a book about this place, a book about Michigan—but after Trump was elected president, I felt that I had to reassess everything, and that book got pushed to the backburner (well, sort of).

How am I supposed to keep teaching—not to mention reading—literature, when the highest public office of the United States is held by a person who is utterly unbound to the words he says, or for that matter, to what he tweets? Donald Trump has been unflappable about the fact that he doesn’t read books, at least not in their entirety—he doesn’t have the time, apparently (“Donald Trump Doesn’t Read Books”). Where does this leave books, in our cultural estimation? What is the role of literary writing in a time when widely read stories can appear (and sometimes actually be) far more fictional and fantastical than we could ever imagine, much less closely read in the classroom? How can literature weigh in on matters of truth, when truth has been jettisoned for something so much more entertaining—and even more persuasive?

My career up to this point has been premised on teaching college students to communicate clearly and honestly, to read widely and with savvy across literary periods and genres, and to develop a measured sense of critical awareness with respect to modern life. I believe in the importance of all these lessons. And yet, I find myself unsure of how to stand by my work—again, admittedly slow work—in a culture that privileges viral storytelling, constant updating of narratives (self and otherwise), and snap judgments regarding things big and small, local and global. Literature is, if anything, a slow enterprise. Whether you’re a reader, a writer, or a bookseller—you are in it for a relatively long haul in terms of literature’s benefits and rewards. Literature is work: it takes work to create, read, disseminate, and preserve. A lot of this work is abstract and often obscured from public view. Literature can feel like a very private experience—writing it, reading it, even teaching and learning it. But any way, at its most basic level—think of a required high school or college English course, early encounters with canonical texts—literature is work. It’s to this work that I attend in the present book, unraveling my own work in relation to literature, and thinking about the broader work that literature does—and is doing, and might do—in an age of dubious connection to the written (and spoken) word.

One note here about audience. This book’s essays were written with three different but overlapping audiences in mind. The first are my unde rgraduate students—past, present, and future—who find themselves engaged in the work of literature and may wonder what it’s all about, from their professor’s perspective. The second audience consists of graduate students in the humanities who are contemplating a life doing the work of literature—however unclear or amorphous that work can seem, at that stage. Then there are my colleagues and peers, others involved in the, at times humiliating, at other times invigorating, work of teaching liberal arts in an age of post-truth. These three audiences are not always easy to balance or speak to in the same way. If the tone of this book drifts and shifts, that is why.

This book—partly a collection of meditations, occasionally a manifesto, and attuned to contemporary tensions throughout—is about teaching literature, thinking about liberal arts education, and finding my place in the accelerated early twenty-first century. It’s about higher education as I have experienced and thought about it over the past ten years, particularly as this time has careened dangerously into the age of “post-truth”: a concept that would have fascinated and galled the late David Foster Wallace, just as it has served and continues to serve, at least for now, Donald Trump’s rise to power. Where it will go from here is anyone’s guess—but I want to add a book to the mix, in hope that it will find readers who likewise find themselves uncertain and entangled in the tendrils of our age.

What is literature?

It’s very strange to take a full year off of doing something that you’ve been doing for over fifteen years, knowing that you’ll return to it but are utterly detached from it in the meantime. For me, that is teaching literature at the college level. Going into sabbatical, I trusted that I would reflect on what (and how) I teach, and hopefully come up with some new ideas, maybe even some new methods.

Over the course of the year, I frequently found myself questioning the very base of what I do: what is literature, in the first place? In fact, this has been a nagging question for me; when I started a blog (it sounds so quaint now) in 2008, I called it “What Is Literature?” I meant this question in earnest. Even as I read more literature, taught literature classes, and wrote about literature, I was less and less sure I knew what it was, or what it did—beyond the easy definitions of poetry, fiction, and drama and their respective social functions. Because, for me, literature has also included airports, advertisements, long walks, Lego toys, and art, among myriad other things.

But even if we rein it in: what is this thing, literature, that seems at once so important to culture—people’s stories, shared traditions, structures of meaning—and yet sometimes all too disposable, just extraneous fluff? English professors can take themselves way too seriously, and can act as if that literature is the beginning and end of all things. I don’t want to fall into that trap. (Or have I already, just by writing this book?) I want to step back and think slowly and deliberately about some of the literature that has impacted my students and me—in class and beyond (I hope). I don’t want to take the work of literature for granted—not in these accelerated times of general hostility to the arts and cultural diversity. But not just in these times. As I said, I’ve been asking this question—what is literature?—for at least ten years. And I want to keep asking it.

I find working answers in literature, often in small pieces of literature. In my classes, I often assign full novels, but we tunnel into specific passages. I think of when I teach Octavia Butler’s Dawn, a near future, postapocalyptic alien romance that is also a metaphysical mindbender. At one point an alien is explaining to a human how he might open his mind concerning their new predicament of coexisting with the aliens, even mating with them, becoming part-them (and the aliens becoming part-human in turn). The human here has enjoyed part of this merger, but is frightened by other aspects, and their implications. But as Butler’s alien Nikanj puts it:

Interpretation. Electrochemical stimulation of certain nerves, certain parts of your brain. . . . What happened was real. Your body knows how real it was. Your interpretations were illusion. The sensations were entirely real. You can have them again—or you can have others. (189)

That first word offered by the alien is “interpretation.” What more do students need to get out of an English class, really? Isn’t that the work of literature, in sum: the art of interpretation? But it doesn’t stop there, importantly. For Butler, interpretations are rendered as illusions, but illusions there for the weighing and choosing, and always linked to real-world conditions, sensations “entirely real.” And if you read the novel you’ll see that this is no simplistic dualism between mind and matter—it’s all entangled, fascinatingly so.

Dawn raises troubling questions about domination, biological determination, and free will. And there is a fierce hopefulness that runs through this novel: a refusal to give up and a resistance to retreat into timeworn adages or definitions. What I love about teaching this novel is the impassioned debates that my students get into as we discuss it, concerning not just the plot of the novel but the stakes it raises: how important or unique is the human species, and how might we remain open to (maybe even becoming) something different, perhaps even better? Butler’s deceptively readable fiction invites us into these quandaries, and offers no ready conclusions. Dawn is only the first of a trilogy on this theme, but there’s something about teaching just this book that agitates endless conversation—conversation that, then, spills into the other works we read in the class. When do we not encounter aliens, in literature? What is literature if not an alien form that springs to life on the page?

Literature is a weird thing, and its effects can be grounding even when it unsettles things we think we know. Take a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of the knapsack. The binoculars. A half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two spoons. He set everything out in a row. There were five small tins of food and he chose a can of sausages and one of corn and he opened these with the little army can opener and set them at the edge of the fire and they sat watching the labels char and curl. When the corn began to steam he took the cans from the fire with the pliers and they sat bent over them with their spoons, eating slowly. (73)

After reading this in class, I might ask my students to inventory their backpacks or purses, setting “everything out in a row” and taking stock of what they carry with them. We might talk about the functions of these things, how sooner or later they will use them—like the pliers and spoons that are named and then utilized mere sentences later, in McCarthy’s story. We might re-view our smartphones as things among others. At the very least, we’ll be off our smartphones in those moments, and in inventory mode. This can seem frivolous, or just silly. But it’s part of the work of literature. It slows us down, helps us focus on the things closest to us, if, then, possibly to engage these things more thoughtfully, more respectfully.

I realize this notion of what literature can do may sound wistfully hopeful, and even utopian. But I see it happen all the time in my classrooms: my students—huddled over literature, reading and making connections, often in amazement—are connecting with each other, and with things. And this inevitably spills over the borders of the classroom and into the world beyond.

Moving bodily sideways

In New Orleans, I take regular morning walks to the Mississippi River, which flows about five blocks from my home in Uptown. I generally go to one particular spot, a big sweeping curve on the river. While technically I head to the river to fly fish, haphazardly casting an assortment of motley flies for a wide range of fish—white bass, freshwater drum, gar, needlefish—I am always struck by the variety of things I find washed up or creeping on the bank, as well as the things drifting by on the surface or swimming in the water itself. The spontaneous treasures are as much fun as the fishing.

I watch huge uprooted trees cartwheeling along, like eerie fun rides spinning by, pulled by the stiff current to be beached somewhere or washed out into the delta beyond. I see faded Doritos bags and disintegrating Styrofoam cups, tattered T-shirts and a lonely Nike Air Jordan flipped over, footless (thankfully). I like to reflect on this gnarly bank, to think about some of these river things, and sometimes to create a very partial inventory along the way. These walks offer a chance to puzzle over some of the spatial and medial spurs attached to dissimilar and seemingly ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright