What Is Literature? |
Posted: March 30, 2020 |
I’ve been up in Michigan again this summer, spending a lot of time with my family, as well as getting out in the woods and fly fishing on my favorite lakes and streams. I’ve also been getting some work done. I published a piece on careerism in college at Public Books—it’s part of a short book I’m working on about liberal arts education. This year I am going to volunteer at the small public school I graduated from in northern Michigan, offering guidance and advice to juniors and seniors who are researching college options. Since I graduated from high school, I’ve had experiences at four quite different institutions around the country—as a student and as an instructor—and I hope I can help some students in their searches for a good fit. I hope to learn about what high school students think about college, and see how this accords (or not) with my sense of liberal arts education in the early twenty-first century. If the experience is interesting, I’ll write about it—maybe it will even become a part of the book. This content has been generated by Essay Writers. I wrote a review of Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K for 3:AM Magazine. I wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed on how scholars can use Twitter. I revised a book chapter for a collection called Sweet Spots: Interstitial New Orleans. The book should be out sometime next year from the University Press of Mississippi, and my chapter is about Louis Armstrong International Airport as a specially liminal space. I wrote an article for a transportation-themed issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment. My contribution is, not surprisingly, on air travel—but I’m moving in new directions that come out of my current book-in-progress, Airportness: The Nature of Flight. I’m making good headway on Airportness and plan to deliver the final manuscript in December. There’s still a lot to do, but I am at the point where I can visualize it in my mind—I can see the shape of the whole book, and see how the pieces have to fit together. It’s a fun if also daunting part of the book assembly project: moving blocks of writing around, creating transitions, experimenting with formal flourishes and other structural details, and so on. I’ll present a piece from Airportness at the Western Literature Association conference in Big Sky, Montana, later this month. My paper is called “Airportness in the West: Fame, Fantasy, Frontier.” I'm on a panel called Dispatches from the Post-West. Meanwhile I’ve been reframing my “Up in Michigan” book project, and I have focused it on broader issues of ‘place’ and the problems and possibilities of landscape ecology in the age of the Anthropocene. I’ve honed a fresh of the proposal and hope to finish the book during the second half of my sabbatical year (so, January through next summer). Reading Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk prompted me to think creatively about how I can indulge in nature writing while also critiquing it from the inside, as it were. Lit Hub revealed a bunch of new book covers and titles signed for our series Object Lessons. We’re about to enter an intense period of serious manuscript editing, as we prepare to release a mega-batch of books in the series in late 2017. If only I could have a bunch of my wonderful Loyola students up here in Michigan, to help me with the series! I’m heading now into sabbatical, for real. It is very odd to be feeling the sun shift to the south up here in Michigan…usually by this point we are back in the sweltering heat of New Orleans, settling into our autumn rhythms there. It’s strange to not be in the classroom. I don’t miss all the various meetings and never-ending budget crises, but do I miss my colleagues and my students. Yet here we are in the north country, and just last night it got very cool. Wind in the pines, a kind of wind I haven't felt in a long time. The bracken fern have all turned gold, on the hillsides. It’s very dark now in the mornings, when I get up to write. Is Black a colour? If I switch the lights out does the wall change colour? The two questions in the blue box illustrate just how relatively simplistic questions can lead us into a veritable minefield of issues all concerned with definitions, interpretations and perceptions. Is black a colour? Well, ask a scientist, an artist, and a member of the general public, and you may get three very different answers. The scientific definition of colour is to do with how we interpret different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation emitted or reflected within the visible spectrum of light. But black is the result of a total absence of visible light radiation, so black cannot be a colour. However in the art world, black can be created by combining pigments of many different colours together. If black is created by combining colours, then surely black must be a colour? The word 'colour' is very much in the public domain, so maybe we should just use the definition the majority in the general populace use? But what is that? Shall we move on to an even more interesting follow-up question. If I switch the lights out does the wall change colour? Simplistically, most of us would immediately answer no. Of course the pigments in the paint are still the same, so if the wall is - say - very pale green, then it will remain very pale green. One could take this question much further. Suppose an intense red light is shone on the wall? Is it still pale green (the colour reflected by the wall pigment in normal white light), or has it become red (the colour we interpret it as now)? And what about colour blind people? Do they not have the right to consider the wall as grey, if that is how they perceive it? And what if no one is in the room? If colour is all about how we perceive it, does the wall have any colour if there is no one there to see it?
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