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
What is Literature?
Moving Bodily Sideways
Perspectivism and Yiyun Li's The Vagrants
From Hillsdale to the Swamp
Teaching at the End of the World
Starting Again with 20th-Century American Fiction
Something Misplaced
Shopping at Walmart (with Žižek)
Teaching with Film
Dropped My iPhone Down Below
Humanities at the Airport
Thinking Space
Against Careerism, For College
Total Satisfaction
In Defense of Small Things
Environmental Studies, with No Limits
College, It's a Mess
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
Unsettling Place
David Foster Wallace: Don't Believe the Hype
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts: A Book Review that Is Not One
Don DeLillo's Zero K: When Does the Person Become the Body?
30 Observations after Reading Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments
Liberal Arts: A Safe Space?
Sabbatical
Walking It Off
Trump in the Anthropocene
Terminal Democracy
Hunting for Morels, Finding a Mess
Flying Through Nowhere
Stuck
Tick Thinking
Dark River Balloon
Landscape Ecology
Back in the Classroom
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
