| Airports tend to prompt compulsory storytelling. Tales of near disaster, endless delays, dramatic weather shifts, a lost bag that suddenly appears---such stories are familiar accounts of a place that seems to thrive on its own mythologies. In this dissertation I show that airports cannot be understood absent the crisscrossing narratives of security and citizenship, transition and vulnerability, location and disorientation that converge at these sites. As much as airports engender storytelling, they also invite reading: from the distractions of light entertainment to the pragmatics of navigating space from concourse to concourse, from arrivals gate to baggage carousel. By attending to what we might call the textual life of airports, I draw attention to the interpretive textures that define these architectural icons of modernity. Through references that range from Modernist fiction to postmodern poetry and American nature writing, I demonstrate that U.S. airports have been routinely imagined as fraught places, and I reveal how actual everyday airport scenarios reproduce the very narratives that denigrate these sites. I also consider contemporary films, public art installations, and advertising ephemera concerning the culture of airports. In this sustained analysis of representations and real spaces, I argue that airports serve as oddly accepted figures for lived dystopian fantasies and fictions. At stake in this critique is a looming sense that the preparatory zone for modern mobility is in fact an incubating point of worst-case scenarios, numbed perceptions, sheer boredom, and occasional terror. While there have been cultural histories and critical overviews of airports, my project includes such studies in its scope---in other words, my project is not just about airports, but about the meta-narratives that circulate around airports, as well. |
