Airportness

The Nature of Flight

Christopher Schaberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781501325694
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501325717
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Airportness takes the reader on a single day's journey through all the routines and stages of an ordinary flight. From curbside to baggage, and pondering the minutes and hours of sitting in between, Christopher Schaberg contemplates the mundane world of commercial aviation to discover "the nature of flight." For Schaberg this means hearing planes in the sky, recognizing airline symbols in unlikely places, and navigating the various zones of transit from sliding doors, to jet bridge, to lavatory. It is an ongoing, swarming ecosystem that unfolds each day as we fly, get stranded, and arrive at our destinations. Airportness turns out to be more than just architecture and design elements-rather, it is all the rumble and buzz of flight, the tedium of travel as well as the feelings of uplift.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Preflight
• 2 Ride to the Airport
• 3 Curbside
• 4 Boarding Pass
• 5 Security
• 6 Walk to the Gate
• 7 People Watching
• 8 Attack
• 9 Waiting
• 10 Workers
• 11 Art
• 12 Gate Change
• 13 Gate Lice
• 14 Fishing Shirts
• 15 Runway
• 16 Holding
• 17 Takeoff
• 18 Window Seat
• 19 Sunrise
• 20 Armrests
• 21 New Planes
• 22 Airplane Reading I
• 23 Consider the Lavatory
• 24 Snacking
• 25 Initial Descent
• 26 Connection
• 27 Play
• 28 Sparrows
• 29 Twitter
• 30 Breakfast
• 31 747
• 32 Colin Farrell
• 33 Somewhere
• 34 In-flight Entertainment II: The Force Awakens
• 35 Airplane Reading II
• 36 Plane Sighting
• 37 Higher Still
• 38 Entanglements
• 39 In-flight Entertainment III: United 93
• 40 Old Planes
• 41 Gender
• 42 Water Landing
• 43 Arrival
• 44 Destination
• 45 Baggage
• 46 Exit
• 47 Home
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright