The Textual Life of Airports

Reading the Culture of Flight

Christopher Schaberg

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441135278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is a book about airport stories. It is about common narratives of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports-the strange or hidden narratives that do not always fit into standard ideas of these in-between places. Tales of near disaster, endless delays, dramatic weather shifts, a lost bag that suddenly appears-such stories are familiar accounts of a place that seems to thrive on and recycle its own mythologies. The Textual Life of Airports shows how airports demand to be read. Working at the intersection of literary studies and cultural theory, Schaberg tracks airport stories in American literature, as well as in a range of visual texts (film, airport art, magazine illustrations). It accounts for how airports appear in literature throughout the twentieth-century, while also examining the influx of airport figures in markedly post-9/11 literature and culture. These literary and cultural representations work together to form "the textual life of airports."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Reprint acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What Is Airport Reading ?
• Chapter 2 Work in the Culture of Flight
• Chapter 3 Detecting the Uncertain Subject of Airport Mysteries
• Chapter 4 9/11: Points of Departure
• Chapter 5 The Airport Screening Complex
• Chapter 6 Airport Studies
• Chapter 7 Ecology in Waiting
• Chapter 8 Bird Citing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index