Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Q&A with Janelle Adsit

Janelle Adsit answered a few questions about her new book, Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing exposes hidden biases of the creative writing curriculum and suggests principles that can counter these biases within the classroom.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

Junot Díaz’s 2014 New Yorker article "MFA vs POC," and Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Cap Max King’s The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books)—among many other works—have identified a clear set of problems in creative writing. The creative writing classroom has centered certain experiences and has, as a result, served to marginalize, demean, or exclude many of the student-writers that come to it. In my view, this is the most urgent problem facing creative writing today. I’ve worked in my classroom to recognize my own blindspots and the limitations of the practices I’ve inherited as a writer and teacher. With this book, I wanted to put my pedagogy and my thinking up for examination in the hopes that it would continue the conversation: What does an antiracist pedagogy for creative writing look like? How do we undo the exclusionary tendencies that are at work in creative writing? These are the questions I came to the book with, and they are the questions I hope the book keeps present in teachers’ and students’ minds.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

In the introductory chapter of the book, I offer a bit of my own personal backstory as both a student and teacher of creative writing. I first became interested in creative writing pedagogy when I was an undergraduate student experiencing it. I knew then that creative writing was forwarding a specific set of literary values, though they weren’t discussed explicitly in those terms. It was then that I decided I wanted to develop a better language for identifying and naming these values. I wanted to make these values seem less natural, less of a given in creative writing. I wanted to expose these values as contingent and as tied to identity. So I’ve been working on this project, in one way or another, since I was in the course Introduction to Creative Writing in my first year of college. I see Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is a waypoint in this journey, and I plan to keep writing about this topic. In fact, Bloomsbury will soon be publishing a couple of books that I am working on now: One is titled Critical Creative Writing, and it is an anthology of essays, written by a wide range of authors, that represent some key debates about literary value and identity. Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is written primarily for other teachers, and Critical Creative Writing is written for writers of all levels, including students.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Thanks to writers in creative writing studies and those who participate in conferences like Thinking Its Presence, there is a growing conversation that exposes the problems of the workshop and the marginalizing tendencies of creative writing’s institutions. But there is much more work to be done—and part of that work focuses on transforming the creative writing curriculum. What can creative writing teachers do to help ensure a more inclusive learning space that ensures dignity and respect for all writers and that advocates for the full diversity of literary traditions? Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing is focused on this question.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Literature provides us a way of looking at ourselves and of transforming ourselves. We can see ourselves in our full complexity in the stories we tell, in the artforms we create. We can also envision something different for ourselves—our societies, our planet—through literary and artistic modes. I hold to that potential of literary writing, and it’s what excites and motivates me as a teacher. I have the privilege of witnessing my students engaging in the transformative capacities of literature. I have the privilege of helping to create a space that fosters that experience.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Stephanie Vanderslice and Becca Manery have put together a wonderful 10^th anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (which I am honored to be part of). The first edition of this book was a landmark text in creative writing studies, and the tenth anniversary edition broadens the scope of the field’s work significantly. I also loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words for the attention to language the Lahiri offers in both content and form. Next on my reading list are English as a Literature in Translation by Fiona J. Doloughan and Censorship and the Limits of the Literary, edited by Nicole Moore.

 

Janelle Adsit is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Humboldt State University. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as Cultural Society, Confrontation, and Requited. She is the author of Unremitting Entrance and a chapbook Press Yourself Against a Mirror. Her research focuses on creative writing pedagogy and labor issues in higher education. She serves as Reviews Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her new book Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum is now available from Bloomsbury.

Q&A with Robert Harvey

Robert Harvey answered some questions about his new book, Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics. 

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

The book demonstrates how thought fueled by imagining liminal life – life at its limit – in what Foucault termed heterotopias, or “spaces otherwise,” stimulates ethical dealings with each other.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’ve devoted most of the scholarly dimension of my career to trying to figure out if art – as I have stubbornly surmised – is a repository of stimuli for making politics (the creation of the future) the moral activity it ought to be. My archival and analytical research in 2013-2014 for the Pléiade edition (Gallimard) of Marguerite Duras’s complete works led me to discover an important philosophical dimension in an ignored short story. This, in combination with a thorough rereading of Michel Foucault’s reliance on literature and, in particular, on the poetry of René Char, led me to the core thread of the book, which I call “hope from heresy.”

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

I started focused research on this book project at the beginning of 2013. In many ways Sharing Common Ground builds upon my study of our propensity for empathy in my 2010 book with Bloomsbury, Witnessness. But in addition to the work on Duras for Gallimard, to which I alluded above, I had occasion in the context of a graduate seminar in Spring 2013 to return to deep reading of major works by Foucault (who, incidentally, had been at Berkeley when I was in graduate school). Two things struck me in the sinews of Foucault’s writing: his abiding deference to inspiration from René Char and his use, in The Order of Things, of the strange formula of the “point of heresy.” From those two springs, my thirst for a project was satiated.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Groups of human actors can together form the basis for an ethics-driven politics. Michel Foucault inspired generations of humanists when he forged the notion of “heterotopia.” Like utopias, heterotopias are at a remove – but only spatially, not temporally. Unlike utopias, heterotopias “claw and gnaw at us,” for they are of our world. Concentration camps, cemeteries, and slums are names for some of these “spaces otherwise” as Foucault was prone to put it. Unable to ignore them, what are we to make of these rebarbative spaces? My answer is that when two or more people imagine spaces otherwise,” their endeavor to do so in common can foster ethical relationships of an especially insightful and impactful sort. In the course of this demonstration, I also challenge Giorgio Agamben’s radical reduction of present and future society to the model of the camp by reinforcing the critical difference between biopolitics and biopower that Michel Foucault did not always clarify. It is in this difference, where biopower still holds its own against biopolitics, that a future for the species to which we belong may be envisioned.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Having always studied philosophy or, more broadly, the history of ideas, I was magnetically drawn to literary texts that took up the challenge of philosophy’s hardest questions not by means of argumentation, but by means of narrative, style, poetic language.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Two books in the series that particularly strike me as essential are The Invention of Monolingualism by David Gramling and Beyond Discontent by Eckart Goebel – the first because monolingualism is the sure route to the demise of the species against which Gramling’s sweeping study is an eloquent cautionary tale; the latter (which actually came out first) because I never understood how the sublime, which I think is so fundamental to bringing reason to ethical maturity, and sublimation sometimes come to cohabit until Goebel’s masterpiece.

 

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, USA. His teaching ranges from literary and film theories to modern and contemporary literatures and the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse. His 2010 book published by Continuum/Bloomsbury, Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics appeared in French as Témoignabilité (2015). He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras (2011, 2014). Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, 2001-2007. His latest book, Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics, is now available from Bloomsbury.

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics – Coming Soon!

We are delighted to announce that next year we will be launching a flagship new book series that aims to become the home for the best and most exciting scholarship in modern and contemporary poetry criticism. Edited by Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, the Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics series seeks to explore the ways in which modern poetry has intersected with philosophy, psychoanalysis, political protest and liberation movements, economic theory and any of the most urgent and important debates of our time.

You can find more details on the series and our future plans here. The first books in the series will publish in 2018 and include:

Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry: This Feeling of Exaltation by John Steen (Galloway School, USA) draws on affect theory and contemporary psychoanalysis to examine negative emotions – anxiety, grief, rage and shame – in a range of modern poets from Wallace Stevens and Robert Creeley to Aaron Kunin and Claudia Rankine. Through this study, the book outlines a new idea of poetic value based not on ‘closure’ but on more open notions of permeability, social intimacy  and attachment.

City Poems and American Urban Crisis by Nate Mickelson (Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, USA) charts the ways in which post-War poetry has responded to the ever-changing experiences of America’s cities and neighborhoods, including Chicago’s Bronzeville, New York’s Losaida, and Los Angeles. Mickelson brings the work of major mid-century poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, and Charles Olson into conversation with contemporary urban theory and planning history and more recent work from poets like Wanda Coleman, Lewis MacAdams and Nuyorican writers of the New York area.

In A Black Arts Poetry Machine, David Grundy (University of Cambridge, UK) brings together new archival discoveries and insightful close reading in an important new study of the work of Amiri Baraka, the Umbra Workshop and the African American poetic avant-garde. Along the way the book shows the ways in which the innovative poetic forms of writers such as Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton engaged with radical poetic responses to state violence and urban insurrection.

Samuel Solomon (University of Sussex, UK) constructs an alternative history of Marxist Feminist British poetry in Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism. Focusing on the theoretical question of social reproduction and turning to an often overlooked tradition of British poetry that includes Denise Riley, J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, John James, and Wendy Mulford, Solomon explores new answers to the question of poetry’s political potential in the modern age and the value of literary education today.

If you think you have a monograph that might fit with the series, do get in touch with Series Editor Daniel Katz at [email protected].

Series Editorial Board:

Hélène Aji (University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France); Vincent Broqua (University of Paris 8 - Vincennes/Saint Denis, France); Olivier Brossard (University of Paris Est-Créteil, France); Daniel Kane (University of Sussex, UK); Miriam Nichols (University of the Fraser Valley, Canada); Peter Middleton (University of Southampton, UK); Cristanne Miller (SUNY Buffalo, USA); Aldon Nielsen (Pennsylvania State University, USA); Stephen Ross, (Concordia University, Canada); Richard Sieburth (New York University, USA); Daniel Tiffany (University of Southern California, USA).

Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel

Guest post by Astrid Bracke

At some point early into my research on climate crisis, I began to get the feeling that climate crisis was everywhere. I saw it referenced in films, novels, in food advertising. This, of course, happens to anyone who immerses herself in a topic: suddenly, her new interest seems all over. I quickly discovered, however, that references to climate crisis really are everywhere. Especially in the years since the beginning of this century, climate crisis has moved from merely an ecological or political problem, to an issue that has become firmly entrenched in our cultural awareness. 

In Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel I write about how the stories we tell about climate crisis are how we try to understand, imagine and come to terms with it. Novels, I argue, don't only reflect awareness of climate crisis, but shape how we tell its story.

One of the dominant stories (or narratives) I write about in Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel is that of climate crisis collapse. This story is familiar from contemporary films as much as novels. What I found particularly interesting is that environmental collapse never comes alone: it always coincides with social, economic and political collapse. In Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, for example, the disappearance of the seasons is described in the same breath as the rise of a totalitarian regime in Britain.

Yet in writing my book I particularly wanted to show that climate crisis isn't only depicted in the story of collapse, but that it influences all of the stories we tell about our natural environment, and quite a few we tell about ourselves.

Another story I explore is that of urban nature. In cities people engage in unique ways with nature and climate crisis, for example through the "real" or local food movement. In Zadie Smith's N/W the farm-to-table spinach that Natalie serves illustrates both her rising social status and the extent to which purchasing local foods is believed to be environmentally beneficent.

Climate crisis, livestock-diseases and the decline of agriculture have changed the most quintessential of British stories about nature: the pastoral. Pastoral is usually associated with idealization, but critiquing that idealization is as much part of it as many contemporary novels show. In Graham Swift's Wish You Were Here, for example, the Robinsons' enjoyment of their new house as an idyllic part of the countryside is time and again interrupted by references to BSE, death and war. 

The final story I write about in Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel is that of the North and South Pole as dominant depictions of climate crisis. Interestingly, a lot of literary fiction about the Arctic is historical fiction. I discuss how past explorations of the Arctic hold up a mirror to contemporary engagements with the region, from tourism to environmentalism. In The Collector of Lost Things (Page) and The Deep Water (McGuire), for example, the nineteenth-century hunt for whales and bears foreshadows the Arctic as a canary in the mine of climate crisis – as well as a popular 'last chance to see' tourist destination.

Climate crisis really is everywhere – not just literally, as it is unfolding in the physical world around us, but also culturally. Twenty-first-century novels provide a perfect space in which to explore these stories of climate crisis, as well as how crisis affects our ideas about ourselves and the world we live in.

I've written more about Climate Crisis and the 21^st-Century British Novel on my website.

Links:

Familiar from contemporary films: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/oct/19/climate-change-hollywood-new-supervillain-geostorm-blade-runner-2049-downsizing

Urban nature: https://astridbracke.com/2014/03/20/urban-nature/

My website: https://astridbracke.com/

 

Astrid Bracke is Lecturer in English Literature at HAN University of Applied Sciences (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). Her book Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel is now available from Bloomsbury's Environmental Cultures series.

Five Lessons from Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom

Guest post by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross

When we began writing Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, our hope for the book was that we could help instructors who were interested in the digital humanities (DH) but did not know where to begin. The idea for the book developed out of a conference session about using digital tools to teach literary modernism. After a particularly intense Q&A session, we realized that the audience showed considerable interest in digital pedagogy but had many fears, questions, and reservations as they began in the field that wouldn’t necessarily occur to DH specialists. We felt that the session demonstrated that a gap in communication was preventing some broadly applicable and generally useful DH methods from making it into classrooms in a variety of fields.

Our book was written precisely to close that gap. Rather than adopt a heavily theorized approach, we focused on the everyday mechanics of teaching. We were reflecting on our own paths of learning from scratch how to teach DH and formalizing these paths into a more organized and purposeful trajectory. As we discussed and wrote about our own teaching experiences and combed through the many wonderful existing resources on DH and teaching, a few unexpected lessons cropped up along the way. A set of guiding principles began to emerge for us as we wrote the book, and we’d like to share these five lessons with you.

Expand your definition of accessibility. Although we are excited by the range of technologies designed to aid users with physical or psychological disabilities, accessibility is not only a matter of using digital tools to ensure that all of your students benefit from your classes. Students facing household- and institution-based economic inequalities, cultural or familial resistances, or social vulnerabilities related to race, gender, religion, or sexuality also deserve careful course planning so they can participate in your pedagogical experiments while feeling safe and supported. Our readings in this area were particularly revelatory for us and will change the way we teach in our own classrooms.

Benefit from collaboration. If you recommend that your students engage in collaborative work but do not do it yourself, give it a try! Collaboration can be fun and productive when you set up a system that works for all involved. Set up regular meeting times to keep one another accountable and motivated, and be willing try out different means of communication. With regard to your teaching, speak with others about your practices, or have them observe you in the classroom. Often, it’s easier for someone else to point out what you do in the classroom than to recognize it yourself.

Embed formalized structure into experimentation. Structure is key during periods of radical experimentation. If you expect your students to wade into the waters of digital mapping, media production, quantitative textual analysis, data visualization, or digital archive construction, you must provide scaffolding. For example, build confidence through repetition and reflection; show models of completed student assignments; construct analytic or holistic rubrics; and involve students in evaluation through iterative, process-oriented, or peer-calibrated grading.

Avoid “tool first, course objective later” thinking. Tools are great, but it’s not (really) about the tools. Digital tools can help you achieve your pre-existing pedagogical goals, they can help you clarify those goals, and they can inspire new goals. But what they cannot do is replace thoughtful course design, careful lesson planning, or subject expertise. Develop—then consistently follow!—course objectives that ensure you always have your humanistic learning outcomes uppermost in your mind as you design and manage digital resources, activities, and assignments.

Recognize and share your tacit knowledge. Perhaps the most important lesson we learned is not to underestimate what you and your students know. Your everyday practices can provide a wealth of inspiration for others’ scholarship and teaching, and your students can teach you a lot by drawing on their own experiences. Everyday tasks build tacit knowledge, by which we mean an often-invisible, experience-based set of valuable concepts and practices. Sharing tacit knowledge is the key to continual, open growth in the digital humanities pedagogy community, so we hope the book will allow others to take advantage of our tacit knowledge—and then pay it forward!

Claire Battershill is Government of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Shawna Ross is Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature and Digital Humanities at Texas A&M University, USA. Their latest book, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, is now available from Bloomsbury.

Tumor: Why I Write

Guest post by Anna Leahy

When my ARCs—advance review copies—of Tumor arrived in the mail, I posted on Facebook, “This was the easiest and most difficult book to write.” I’ve been thinking about what I meant by that statement and how writing can be both easy and difficult at once.

In his essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell claims, “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.” This assertion suggests that writers do what comes easily and that we tackle book projects that are self-serving. Later in the same paragraph, Orwell claims, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” This statement suggests that writers invite nearly overwhelming challenge into our lives in the form of writing, which doesn’t sound self-serving at all. So, I am not the first writer to have asserted that writing is both easy and difficult simultaneously.

I’ve written before about why I write. I’m especially interested in the question of why I—or anyone—writes this, now.

Here’s why I wrote Tumor. My father was diagnosed with liver cancer just as I was turning sixteen, likely the long-term consequence of his work during his requisite military service decades earlier. My mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when I was forty-six and on a one-semester sabbatical from my academic job so that I could focus on writing, though, of course, I had not planned for that time to be the foundation for this book. Statistically, according to the American Cancer Society, one in three women and one in two men will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their—in our—lives. My parents were two for two. I belong to a cancer family.

So, Tumor is personal. I am the vain and selfish writer Orwell acknowledges. I believed that my family’s cancer story was enough, at least to get started, at least for myself. In her version of “Why I Write,” Joan Didion describes the writer as “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” Yes, the work of this book absorbed me completely, and I’m especially grateful for a residency at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony that allowed for the luxury of becoming completely absorbed by arranging words into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The sentences mattered to me. The sentences made sense, in fact created sense in their grammar and sound. Didion goes on, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Yes, I wrote Tumor in order to understand what cancer means for me and, by extension, for so many of us even though each iteration of cancer is individual.

The writing process was sometimes exhausting, draining my energy in ways I had not quite experienced before. The word exhaust comes from the Latin meaning to use up. Indeed, this book used me up—and that felt strangely good. At times, I pushed against the limits of my capacity to hold disparate ideas in my mind and weave together science, history, culture, and language. What exhausts can also exhilarate. At times, fingers skimming the keyboard, tears leaked down my face. That experience of weeping while writing was new and unpredictable, as memories flickered in my peripheral view when I was looking at something else to see what it means. I kept writing sentences.

I can’t help but think that the Object Lessons series offered me the form that I hadn’t realized I needed. Until I understood that a tumor is the object that is us, I had no idea how to figure out what I was thinking and what cancer means. Once I wrote the words “Tumor is the object that is you”—in the initial proposal—everything started making sense.  Tumor has been necessary writing for me, the writing that I couldn’t not do.

 

Anna Leahy is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, Director of Undergraduate Research  and Creative Activity, and a Professor of English at Chapman University, USA. Her publications include the poetry collection Aperture, the co-written cultural memoir Generation Space, the scholarly collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing, and Tumor, now available from Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Q&A with Jane Hiddleston

Jane Hiddleston answered some questions about her new book, Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition.

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

It’s a study of the role and status of francophone literature in North Africa from the 1980s to the present.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’ve worked on francophone postcolonial literatures for a long time, and my previous book was a study of a group of major literary writers who were also political figures during the period of decolonization. Writing After Postcolonialism looks at the following generation, to see whether perceptions of the power of literature have changed. This is also a crucial period because it’s one where writers have been treated with intense suspicion: some were killed in Algeria during the 1990s, and many across the region have seen their work banned. I wanted to explore why it was that literature could provoke such reaction, and also to reflect on how this climate changed the ways in which writers think about their work.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

Much of the thinking for the book was germinating for quite some time, while I was working on my previous study of intellectuals and decolonization. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between literature and politics, and the recent period in North Africa is one where that relationship has been particularly fraught. I began thinking in detail about the texts chosen for close reading in 2012, though some of the writers, such as Assia Djebar have interested me for much longer – I published a book on her back in 2006. I did a lot of the writing for Writing After Postcolonialism while on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2014-15.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

The book looks at a broad corpus of francophone North African literary works published between 1980 and 2015, and offers an overview both of contemporary cultural politics in the Maghreb and of the complementary literary critical fields of postcolonial criticism and ‘world literature’. The specific focus on literarity, however, is also important, and means that the book should be relevant not only to readers interested in North Africa but also to literary theorists more broadly.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

Literature is a powerful source of inspiration and a fuel for creative thinking. As the book tries to demonstrate, it’s also a forum that encourages its readers to think for themselves, to ask questions, to contest orthodoxies, to doubt. For this reason it seems crucial to me to the survival of free thinking and to the creation of a more ethical world.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

I like Maria Lauret’s Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature, also in the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. Lauret’s interest in the use of different languages in literary works ties in with my current research project on multilingualism and world literature. Her study also demonstrates how the creative use of language in literature can encourage openness and cultural dialogue.

 

Jane Hiddleston is Fellow and Tutor in French at Exeter College, University of Oxford, UK. Her previous books include Understanding Postcolonialism (2009) and Postructuralism and Postcoloniality (2010).

Seeing Things

Guest post by William Germano

My latest book is Eye Chart, just out in the Object Lessons series. Eye Chart is about ways of thinking about vision – from the first primitive attempts to decide who in the group has the sharpest eyes to the development of lenses and eyeglasses, those awkward and essential armatures that hold lenses in place just so.

One of my primary interests is early modern Europe, which means I wind up reading a lot of strange and something very unliterary things.

A while back I came across a little book that stopped me cold – it was written in Spanish, and it explained, with some very funny anecdotes, the problems of nearsightedness and farsightedness and how lenses could help.  The book – about which not much has been written – was published in 1623.

I had an idea: could I trace a history of attempts to gather precise, reproducible knowledge – medical data, really – about how “good” our eyes were? And that led me to the nineteenth-century giants of eye research, including Herman Snellen – everybody who’s ever had an eye test knows the Snellen chart, with rows of letters, large at top to painfully small at the very bottom.

And that took me all sorts of places – to painters, x-rays, Rorschach tests, other ophthalmological pioneers like Eduard Jaeger, Victorian military recruiting,  Alice in Wonderland, modern advertising campaigns, film history, toys, rude t-shirts  – and helped me understand just how widespread the power of the simple and familiar eye chart has become.

But it gave me something else, too. The eye chart took on a life of its own and became a kind of metaphor for our limitations, a graphic tool that helped us ground ourselves in the visual sphere.

Designed as a medical tool, the eye chart can also be something more – even something metaphysical – guiding us to our sense of self and our place in the world as we see it.

Eye Chart is a little book with a wide span – history and cultural studies, medicine and typography and pop culture  -- from Euripides  to Mr Magoo.  Each of us is somewhere in there.  

 

William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union in New York City. He’s the author of two books on publishing – Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (3/e 2016) and From Dissertation to Book (2/e 2013), both from the University of Chicago Press, and The Tales of Hoffmann (2013, BFI Film Classics). His blogs on language appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education and on line at http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/author/wgermano/ 

The Media Learns from Disasters, but We Do Not

Guest post by Robert Ficociello and Robert Bell

Two recent news articles about hurricanes Harvey and Irma, one from the LA Times and another from Politico, offered us an opportunity to compare some of our conclusions in America’s Disaster Culture to the tragic unfolding aftermath of these two storms. One of our suggestions in the book calls for a closer attention to how natural disasters are discussed—its language—in the media, who dominates the production of disaster narratives, and when does the narrative get finalized.

In terms of disaster discourse, perhaps due to the chronological proximity of Harvey and Irma, we see the conflation of the Harvey and Irma despite their geographical distance, impact, and politics. One can donate to “Harvey and Irma” at Walmart and the Dollar Store as you check out. Related to this commercialization of disaster, we noticed that unlike Katrina “looting” did not rise as a major issue. The LA Times article addresses these terms and again this infamous meme appears.

However, the first time “looting” becomes visible, it gets retracted quickly. The Twitter backlash toward the ABC journalist is unforgiving as well. We see two takeaways from this. First, whether or not looting is happening is difficult to ascertain. Second, “looting” is now a delicate word, and Twitter activism has contributed to policing disaster discourse for charged language. This policing applies to how we see race enter into the popular media discussions less frequently than we did in similar discussions after Katrina. As a result, this deliberate attempt to deracialize disaster has proven largely successful and intentionally serves to hide the disproportionate effects that disasters, Harvey and Irma included, have on minority populations.

The fact that social media becomes the news in a disaster narrative is another change. The media coverage of these storms proves interesting as well. We watched three of the major cable news networks: CNN, Fox, and the Weather Channel. CNN took a decidedly human-interest approach to both hurricanes. Anderson Cooper and other CNN figures jetted around Texas and Florida and reported from the ground. For the majority of coverage, politics had been excluded from the disaster discussion. However, in studio, Chris Cuomo interviewed Counselor to the President Kellyann Conway and began immediately to confront her about the politics of Harvey. Thereafter, Cuomo used the show to unite a family separated during the evacuation and check in with CNN reporters in Texas. The Weather Channel focused unsurprisingly on the mechanics of the hurricanes. Coverage came from Jim Cantore and fellow meteorologists standing in the wind and rain. From the desk, Dr. Nabb provided worst-case forecast for rainfall, storm surge, and wind damaged to Texas and the Southeast. Harvey and Irma became true celebrities on this network. Their images inserted always on the lower right of the screen. On Fox’s prime-time The Five, the show began with hosts criticizing the liberal media for politicizing Harvey. The remainder of the show discussed the disaster’s politics and belittling other networks’ Harvey coverage. Actual coverage of the disasters was minimal, coming mainly through weather updates, but the politics of disaster was highlighted. If you were to watch only one of these major networks, then you would experience vastly different Harveys and Irmas.

Although both disasters dominated news for almost a week straight, Harvey and Irma are complete; their fifteen minutes of fame exhausted. Harvey suffered at the hands of Irma. Irma fought off Jose and Maria. However, the media should inform and remind Americans that core causes (climate change, neoliberalism) and recovery efforts (aid packages, environmental policy) continue. The irony of course comes from the profusion of hurricanes this summer, which should create a greater awareness. But with hurricanes and tropical depressions rolling off west Africa, the swipe left/swipe right approach to news allows Americans to move on with ease of use and ease of dismiss. The rising action plot points of Harvey and Irma, much like literary and cinematic narratives, is more exciting and compelling than a denouement.

 

Robert C. Bell is Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum center and Instructor in the English Department at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the Fiction Editor of the New Orleans Review. Robert M. Ficociello is Assistant Professor of Writing at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, USA. He is Co-Chair of the Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes area of the Pop Culture/American Culture Association. Their new book America's Disaster Culture: The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture will be available on October 19th from Bloomsbury. 

Airport Studies

Guest post by Christopher Schaberg

This month my third book about airports will be published. It’s called Airportness: The Nature of Flight.

When I tell my friends and colleagues about this book, they often say something like, “Another book about airports?” A more generous way to look at it is that it is a trilogy which is now complete. And really, these three books are very different from one another—each one has approached the topic in a unique way.

I’ve been reflecting on these books, and I think I can summarize their different approaches like this:

The Textual Life of Airports is about how airports appear: how they appear in literary texts, visual art, and contemporary culture at large—and what these appearances say about how modern humans travel by air.

The End of Airports is about how airports work: how they operate, how they function on the tarmac and in terminals, and what they make passengers and workers do.

Airportness is about how airports feel: how we experience them as travelers and as a species, and how they insinuate themselves into everyday life on this planet, especially at this particular moment.

Airportness follows a single day of flight, from the early morning ride from hotel to the airport, all the way back home at the end of a multi-leg journey. This book really challenged me to think carefully about narrative, form, and emplotment. Writing Airportness pushed me in new ways, which was a good feeling. Sometimes we get into ruts with our writing—writing for the same basic audiences, article after article, essay after essay, book after book. Since I began working on the Object Lessons series, I’ve thought a lot about ways of writing for crossover audiences—ranging from general readers to students to colleagues to academics in other disciplines—and I incorporated a lot of this thinking into Airportness as I revised and organized it. (At one point, shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I nearly re-conceptualized the book drastically—but fortunately my calm, measured editor Haaris Naqvi talked me back from the ledge, and the final book is so much better because of his keen advice. Take note: thank your editor today!)

But so with Airportness I was trying to gear my airport studies to a broader audience—while still drawing on various critical traditions and concepts throughout the book. I was also trying to push the envelope in terms of what nature writing can be. I’ve written about the weird ecosystems of air travel before, but in this book I attempted to keep these considerations in the foreground, wondering about human flight as something counter-intuitively natural for our species. Love it or hate it—or just tolerate it—air travel is something our species has evolved to do. What would it mean to inhabit these spaces and times—airports, airliners, the durations of flight—with this in mind?

With all the harrowing headlines and stories in the news—skirmishes between passengers, airline agent aggression, the iron fist airport security, travel bans, shrinking seats, laptop bans, and so on—the topic of flight is in the air, more than ever. I hope Airportness can help put some perspective on this fraught form of mobility.

Am I done with airports, now? My friends and colleagues want to know. When I delivered this manuscript I really thought yes, I am done. BUT. I keep writing. And things keep happening at airports and in planes, things that are clearly (and sometimes not so clearly) related to this tense moment. There’s much more to explore around this topic, for better or worse. So, I’m working on something entirely new. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I hope readers will enjoy Airportness: The Nature of Flight. You can take it with you on your next flight! It’s conference season, after all—a time when so many academics fly around, lose bags, make connections, and share their ideas. This book brings together my latest theories and questions concerning the nature of flight.

 

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013), The End of Airports (2015) and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.