Dr. Christopher Schaberg, "The Ends of Adventure"

32 Campus Dr.,Missoula MT 59812

06 October, 2022

Description

Please join us for the Fall 2022 Making Humanities Public Lecture with Dr. Christopher Schaberg, the Dorothy Harrell Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for Editing and Publishing, Loyola University, New Orleans. Dr. Schaberg will present a lecture entitled, "The Ends of Adventure: What Do We Want From Environmental Awareness?" The event will take place on the University of Montana campus in the University Center Theater and will be live-streamed simultaneously on Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent via Event Brite on the day of the lecture and you can also access it here. The lecture will draw from Dr. Schaberg's new book, Adventure: An Argument for Limits. In this book, he asks several questions, including what is the meaning of ‘adventure’ as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, after a global pandemic, social and geopolitical calamities, and accelerating environmental catastrophes? What stories are humans telling about wilderness, remote destinations, and extreme activities? How are adventures represented in contemporary fiction, film, and other cultural forms? What are the limits of this word, this idea? In Adventure, Dr. Schaberg takes time out of our frenetic era to reflect on these questions and on the human compulsion for adventure—and how we find it, or not. Adventure opens with a pinball assortment of unexpected encounters with adventures and adventure-seeking. The second part of the book recounts a series of personal adventures and misadventures in New Orleans, Louisiana, as hurricanes intensify and urban infrastructure teeters on the brink. The third part of Adventure considers Mars colonization fantasies as well as the burgeoning commercial space tourism industry. Finally, the book outlines an argument for the limits of adventure, with a series of challenges for readers to consider in their own lives. Meet our featured speaker: Dr. Christopher Schaberg is the founding co-editor of the book series Object Lessons, a public humanities venture that creates crossover publishing opportunities for a wide range of scholars and writers. The series is also one of the foundations of Loyola’s Center for Editing and Publishing, which Schaberg co-directs. Schaberg’s scholarship merges public humanities inquiry with environmental criticism. His wide-angle books The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth (2018), and Pedagogy of the Depressed (2022) are concerned with the value and practice of humanities teaching on a damaged planet. Schaberg’s 2019 Searching for the Anthropocene brings ecological questions to bear on far-flung aspects of contemporary culture. Fly-Fishing, publishing in March 2023 as part of Duke University Press’s Practices series, blends memoir and ecocritcism to demystify the titular activity. A leading expert in the study of air travel, Schaberg has published four books on flight: The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic (2020). He also co-edited the nonfiction anthology Airplane Reading (2016), with Mark Yakich. Schaberg’s writings appear frequently at public-facing venues such as The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Sierra, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere.