Adventure: An Argument for Limits

What is the meaning of “adventure” as we enter the third 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 the most difficult thoughts thinkable? Adventure is a pinball assortment of unexpected encounters. Each chapter entertains a specific project, fantasy, or activity that dabbles with adventure – and runs into limits. Subjects range from Mars exploration, commercial space tourism, and adventure consumerism, to the day-to-day experiences of living in a world increasingly impacted by climate change and environmental disasters. Taking a wide-angle view – at times personal, at others theoretical – Schaberg explores our ideas about adventure and their narrative, cultural, and philosophical underpinnings.

Table of Contents:
Part 1. A Little Adventure Everywhere Part 2. Nowhere Else: Adventures in and out of New Orleans Part 3. Final Frontiers: Misadventures in Space Part 4. The Ends of Adventure Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans, USA. He is the author of 7 books, including The Textual Life of Airports (2013), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), and Pedagogy of the Depressed (2022). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Review :
This is a moment at which terribly serious issues confront humans everywhere. But, unfortunately, the very idea of seriousness is one of the issues. Most of all, we need a sense that the future can be different from the past. We need a sense of adventure. How to stay flexible, that's the key. We get paralyzed with seriousness. Schaberg has been showing us how to be playful for quite some time. Adventure is a playful book that lets you walk through it one step at a time, written by a maestro of meaningfulness. With Adventure, Chris has finally distilled many of his other books to their common element: the uncanny experience of coming up against the limit of the adventure fantasy of the 20th century, and how that experience carries one into the 21st. It frees the reader of both the weight of adventure as classically conceived and the downer that is most talk of limits and lockdowns. Instead, it reminds readers that what we make of our daily journeys depends entirely on how we can reshape the idea of adventure – and indeed, the very desire for adventure – into one that can serve us better in the present.