Undermined in Coal Country

Bill Conlogue is a professor of English at Marywood University, a small college in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the center of the Lackawanna Valley, once a site of feverish deep mining for anthracite coal, now a rusty land of high unemployment, poverty, and environmental decay. In Undermined in Coal Country, Conlogue, who grew up in the Lackawanna Valley, ponders the place he lives and works. How does a liberal-arts college justify its existence in one of America's quintessential wastelands? How does a humanist with academic training make sense of and find solace amid the distress around him? He focuses on “three threads: an exploration of Scranton's resource extraction history, readings of literary works that comment on this history, and Marywood's coping with its coal-mining past” (p. xiv). Neither a conventional history (though there is history here) nor an exercise in literary criticism (though there are discussions of both canonical and popular literature), this book is a series of essays, mixing the personal with the academic. With Emersonian chapter titles such as “Fire,” “Body Language,” and “Burying Books,” it interweaves family history, anthracite coal mining, and the complex relations of Marywood University to the surrounding communities, all the while dipping into various corners of American and European literature. Behind this is Conlogue's hope that the better we grasp the travails of a specific place, such as Scranton, the more likely we will be able to address what often seem overwhelming environmental challenges

Humanism · Political science · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · History · Law