About the Book
CRASH! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction.
Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, beyond rote media reports and forensic accident investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural materials — poems and novels, songs, films, art, TV series, and on and on — that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture—more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways.
A unique and extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural examination, CRASH! takes the reader on a journey that includes reflections on flight phobia, themes of crash survival (with asides on Lord of the Flies, The Little Prince, and Ernest Hemingway’s two-day two-crash adventure), the existentialism of pilots’ last words, the day the music died, deep dives into modernist plane wreck paintings, kamikaze pilots and their Zen death poems, plane crashes before planes, ‘race, crash, and gender,’ and the cultural aftermath of 9/11.
Ultimately, Malamud shows that crashes do not bring about complete and total destruction: we accomplish some degree of restoration by shoring fragments against the ruins. The plane is dead; long live the plane.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
1. Aviation and Its Discontents
2. Plane Crashes Before Planes
Diversion: Aircraft Accident Report NTSB/AAR-88/09
3. Existential Aviation and Poetic Premonitions of Death
4. The Day the Music Died
5. Crashes in Art
6. Art in Crashes
7. Race, Crash, and Gender
Diversion: UTA 772 Memorial
8. I Will Survive
9. The Zen and Karma of Plane Crashes
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author :
Randy Malamud is Regents’ Professor of English at Georgia State University, USA. He is the author of 12 books, including the influential Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998), The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist (2018), and Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers (2021). He writes about film, travel, ecocriticism, and culture for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Film International, Common Knowledge, Salon, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and truthout. He has been interviewed about his books on NPR, BBC, CNN, and numerous podcasts. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Review :
Malamud's Crash! is a high flying, acrobatic, daring, jet-propelled analysis of aviation disasters in art, literature, poetry, music, and real life. It's a definitive, obsessive, sometimes even fetishistic investigation into what happens when things go wrong in the skies. An in-depth humanist study of a common nightmare, Crash! is the cultural black box of plane crash residue.
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise includes a cameo role for air disasters, as spectacular phenomena rife with postmodern irony. Randy Malamud takes DeLillo’s gambit seriously, and even further, discovering a debris field fecund with vibrant remains and littered with the spent meanings of modernity. This book focuses intently on the quasi-taboo subject of plane crashes, as if intellectually willing one of our fastest forms of human travel to slow down and move in freeze frame beneath a careful, analytic lens. While no one asked for an earnest guide to this grisly realm, Malamud has nevertheless volunteered for the job, and carries it out with critical aplomb.
Filled with the harrowing and the mundane, CRASH! takes us on the wildest of rides. From stories of suicidal pilots, debris fields, and crash site memorials to examinations of pop music lyrics, folktales about flight, and kamikaze death poems, Malamud provides us with a stunning pre- and post-mortem of crashing. Who knew, for example, that Paula Abdul faked a crash story to gain a new measure of notoriety? That Roald Dahl's literary career was propelled by surviving a plane crash? Or, that hundreds of artworks by the likes of Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Cindy Sherman, held in private corporate collections, became so much debris when planes took down the World Trade Center Towers? Ultimately, in Malamud's hands, air tragedy is turned over and over again, until it's revealed to be more sublime than we could ever imagine.
