I just watched the film, Knowing, starring Nic Cage as an MIT professor of astrophysics (why not?) who faces an escalating series of catastrophes. Spoiler warning: it doesn’t end pretty for Nic or the rest of us. Turns out the sun is getting ready to emit a solar flare that incinerates all life on our fair planet. Who knew?

Evidently, we did. In fact, we know a lot. We know our world could flood (Waterworld), comets could pummel us multiple times over (Deep Impact, Armageddon), a sudden ice age could bury civilization (Day After Tomorrow), humans could become infertile (Children of Men), and a cure for cancer could mutate into a virus that either kills or alters survivors into feral animals (I Am Legend). And these visions only scratch the surface of what could happen.

Now, we also know that these things are all highly improbable - and even scientifically erroneous on a ridiculous scale - but we know them in the sense that we know there are certain natural vulnerabilities to the lives we otherwise take for granted. We also know that knowing is half the battle (thank you, G. I. Joe). To know is to retain a certain amount of perceived control, or at least a sense of agency in the very act of knowing. Indeed, that is the underlying theme and ultimate frustration of the film Knowing. Having foreknowledge of events does not necessarily stop them from happening, yet knowing they are going to happen - and thus seeing a kind of pattern to the events (however chaotic) - helps the characters make sense and find peace (even faith) in the face of cataclysm.

But can we know too much? Aside from the perennial interpretations of apocalyptic films that probably have something to do with Freud’s theory of the death drive or some more spiritual interpretation about our own curiosity about mortality, I wonder if such visions of our fate have less to do with death itself than with knowing far too many possible ways to die.

Further, in a WSJ.com article this past weekend, “Hollywood Destroys the World,” the authors note that there has been a shift in recent years (especially after 9/11) to films that are post-apocalyptic. The last-second salvation found in films like Armageddon no longer appears to be an option. Even in Knowing, the hope is not for those on Earth but for those who leave it (in a literal and disappointing deus ex machina twist). Earth itself is swallowed by the reach of the sun’s radiated belch, and in the film we get a long sequence of scenes showing exactly how our world will be destroyed (well, the world of Boston and New York, since those are the only areas worth destroying on screen - except maybe LA). Moreover, as the article notes, the next set of films are post-apocalypses of varying kinds, including 2012, which has a graphically destructive trailer circulating already:

Yet rather than the usual religio-psychological reasoning for obsessing over our own demise, could this post-apocalyptic shift, from the 90s to the 2000s, be construed as a kind of exhaustion from knowing too much? There are simply too many things that could destroy everything we know - and we know those many things well enough to envision them happening to us over and over and over again. Even the Mayan prediction looks like it will be interpreted as a global upheaval of the earth’s crust, causing any number of disasters - notably the exaggerated force of the tsunamis that recently hit southeast Asia.

But maybe at a certain point, knowing just isn’t enough. Thus we experience our world being destroyed, or we imagine surviving in a world fundamentally transformed, without the kind of grand-scale hope that celebrated the nuking of that hurdling meteor in Armaggedon.

However, knowing too much does not negate hope entirely. After all, even the ultimate apocalypse in the fantastic documentary and History Channel series, Life After People, still offers the hope that Earth itself will survive our ravages, thus offering a kind of postmortem redemption regardless of what the future holds. Knowing that life goes on at all is perhaps the only knowledge worth gaining from these prophetic visions, regardless if we’re still in the picture or not.

In the contemporary American university, literary studies could easily be considered the canary in the coal mine of humanities education. Among the last of the trappings of traditional liberal education (i.e. lessons in the Classic languages, refinement through philosophy, and exclusion of women), literature has long been where the vestiges of liberal thinking (cultural, not political) held ground. But we’ve know for some time that the bird is gasping for air under the pressure of corporate administrations and vocational curricula that demand its relevance beyond the crumbling walls of the ivory tower. In other words, rather than being a vestige, literature seems increasingly vestigial.

So why is the latest argument from literature another weak defense that sidesteps the challenge altogether?

Last week, Carol Jago, President-Elect of the National Council of the Teachers of English, sent out a report ambiguously entitled, “Crash! The Currency Crisis in American Culture.” Aside from a clever play on our economic preoccupations, Jago - in ripe Bloomian fashion - warns that the death of literary studies will lead to the end of critical thinking as we know it - even jeopardizing “almost everything that this great nation once used to value—independence, freethinking, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Despite an opening line that suggests the very challenge Jago then sidesteps (”writing about literature may seem the least practical”), the report reinforces the circular reasoning of the belles lettres “it’s good because it’s good” argument for studying literature for its own sake. For example, in response to teaching K-12 students contemporary young adult fiction, Jago states:

Once we disdain to teach works that need to be taught to be understood, we not only debase the coinage of literature but also bring into question our own function. It is precisely because literature needs to be taught that we need teachers of literature.

So we need literary analysis because we need/have literature teachers. And what exactly is the “coinage” of literature if we refuse acknowledge contemporary YA fiction as such?

She even defends literary analysis as valuable because it has its own jargon. (Having its own jargon necessitates lit’s right to be studied, which of course necessitates a vocabulary for studying it, and so on.) If that were the case, why not privilege auto maintenance or agriculture - each of those also “employs a language all its own”?

Jago even rather flippantly says that if writing an essay on a novel “seems artificial and school-based, so be it” (emphasis added). So be it? That’s her retort to the social and cultural challenges to render liberal education relevant for a contemporary world? Jago’s “so be it” dismisses the question being asked of literary studies altogether. Instead she couches her justification in claims that analyzing literature teaches students “how to make a life” rather than just making a living. (Notice the dig on vocational education.)

Such premises fall under a category of argument that has also been leveled at rhetoric at times. Richard Lanham has called this the “weak defense” of self-justification, which he contrasts to the “strong defense” of social relevance and influence. To quote Lanham in an online interview:

The Weak Defense argues that there are two kinds of rhetoric, good and bad. The good kind is used in good causes, the bad kind in bad causes. Our kind is the good kind; the bad kind is used by our opponents. The Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative.

I know I tread political toes when I say this, but defending literature with the Weak Defense (lit is good because we say its good - and thus worthy of analysis in education) cannot adequately respond to the pressures that are trying to drive literary study out of our curricula. The Weak Defense will not save the canary.

And I do think the canary is worth saving. Literature is a moving art form capable of great rhetorical feats. But literary studies as a discipline - and English teachers of all ilks - need to start pursuing the Strong Defense that proves its worth as such. Literature needs to be contextualized by the social dramas that make up human existence - and not just by adopting a New Historicist or Cultural Studies perspective. (Critical theory clearly did not “save” this bird.) Literature needs to be recognized not as ornamental but determinative of the human condition, of having a lasting impact as a form of human communication.

In other words, a Stronge Defense of literature - and thus literary analysis (though perhaps revised in method) would recognize that literature is not merely representative but rhetorical, conveying messages that have far greater relevance if we only knew how to spread those messages beyond these crumbling walls.

I have to make sense of what just happened on my adventurous - infuriating - coast-to-coast return from the CCCC’s conference.

11:00 pm PT Sunday Morning, San Francisco

I’m on my way to SFO when Delta’s computerized woman calls me for the fourth time to update me about changes in my flight times, because Delta knows how important it is to keep me informed. Evidently my flight into ATL will land 30 minutes after the last flight to Wilmington leaves, so they’re booking me on flights out of SFO for Monday instead. Oh hell no.

So I get the live woman at the Delta counter to keep me on the flight to ATL on Sunday, and book me for the first flight out to Wilmington Monday morning - but she keeps me booked on the Sunday night connection just in case it’s delayed and I can catch up to it. Great. Fine. But I call a friend to cover my morning class and tell another that she probably won’t have to pick me up until Monday morning. Then I wait two more hours to board a plane that will only get me 85% of the way home. At least they had little TVs in the seat backs to make me feel better after I did course prep for courses I wasn’t sure I’d get to teach.

10:00 pm ET Sunday Evening, Atlanta

Five hours later I deboard and ask the gate agent if the flight to Wilmington has departed. She just points to the departures list that I hadn’t noticed behind me and says, “It’s at D34. You better run.” I’m in the B terminal, not D. The flight was posted as leaving at 10:30 and it was already after 10. So I run. Towing a suitcase, shouldering my laptop bag, and wearing more layers than any marathoner ever should.

I hit the train to take me from B to D, and walk up the escalator as I curse the Norton Anthology weighing down my suitcase. I get to the concourse only to see that I’m at Gate 21, and 34 isn’t even in sight. So I run again … only to reach the gate, with other red-faced, short-of-breath passengers from other flights who are ready to board. But Delta’s boarding a flight to Syracuse, with another bound for Baton Rouge right behind it. The Wilmington flight isn’t leaving for yet another half hour - which turns into another hour (11:20, 2 hours after it’s schedule departure time) because the plane were waiting on from Tulsa turned back to Tulsa and they had to tow another recently repaired plane out of the hangar. Great. Fine. Just get me in the air. I call my friend and tell her she’ll be able to pick me up tonight after all, if she’s willing. Life is good again.

12:45 am ET Monday Morning, Over Wilmington

We start descending and the guy next to me - evidently a local cardiologist with a history of being in near-death experiences on flights - looks out and notes how foggy it is. Next thing we know, we’re ascending again and the pilot announces that the visibility is so poor that we’re in a holding pattern over Wilmington and we’ll make one more attempt to land. But if we can’t, we’re going to be rerouted to our backup location in Charleston, SC. Sure enough. We get within a couple hundred feet of the ground, the whole plane load of people crossing their fingers or sending their prayers, and the engines suddenly kick back in and we take off again into another ascent. I swear. Others groan. We start looking around at each other asking, “How are we getting back home from Charleston?”

2:00 am ET Monday Morning, Charleston

We land safely in South Carolina - no fog, and no idea what’s going to happen next. I text my friend who had been waiting outside the ILM airport to pick me up, finally able to tell her I was rerouted at the last moment. Then they keep us on the plane while the pilots talk to the “Company.” Then we’re given two options:

1. Delta will put us up in a hotel in Charleston and then we can take the next flight out to Wilmington - by way of ATL. Of course.
2. Delta will arrange to have a bus drive us the 3-4 hours to Wilmington immediately.

Everyone around me agrees we’re getting on the bus. We deplane and they send us into baggage claim to get all of our bags and wait for the bus. Then a Delta rep shows up and announces that he can’t arrange to have a bus pick us up and take us up to Wilmington. Instead, he’s called a bunch of airport taxis - minivans and 10- or 13-passenger vans - to come pick up those who want to leave immediately. So the cardiologist invites me to join him and his colleague to get on one of the first vans, under the auspice that they’re doctors and have to get back quickly. Ironically, the first two vans were full except one seat open next to the cabbie in the 10-passenger van. So I take it and wish the doctor good luck.

Around 2:45 our cabbie, Otis - sporting a flat-brimmed pork pie hat and a cool calm in the face of our haggard mess - drives us out of Charleston, bound for Wilmington via Myrtle Beach. Of course, Otis has never driven north of Myrtle Beach, so he doesn’t really know where he’s going. Great. Fine. The two obnoxious women from Connecticut behind me take the reigns and direct him - and keep complaining the whole way about the travel ordeals they’ve experienced at Delta’s hands over the last 24 hours. I feel for them, but really just want them to shut up.

Like we’re on a family road trip, we stop at a trucker-supporting gas station that was actually open, just south of Georgetown, SC. Otis needs coffee and we make a pit stop. Another van catches up with us - but still no sighting of the doctor. Oh well.

6:00 am ET

Under the direction of the UConn women, Otis gets us safely to the ILM airport where some of the passengers transfer to a local taxi to finish their trip. But I turn to one of the guys from my van, who mentioned he worked for the school of business here at UNCW and lived in Kure Beach, and I ask if he can drop me off on his way south through town. Yes, total stranger. But at 6 am after hours together, I don’t seem all that concerned. He’s almost my dad’s age so … Anyway, the guy forgets where he parked his car, so I stay put while he finds it, and then I have to give him directions through town because he’s only lived in Wilmington for a few weeks. Of course.

Long story long: I get home at 6:30 am. What should have been a 7-hour trip was a 16-hour tour of transportation and the Carolinas. Ugh. I’m keeping my feet on the ground for good long time. Thanks, Delta.