I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I spent the bulk of my twenties in various English programs writing papers with titles like “Metonymy and Violent Signifiers in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend ” and “The Floating Phallus and the Signification of Gender in Wuthering Heights .” As you may have guessed, these papers bear more than a whiff of theoretical garbage. And while I don’t regret having studied literature for many years, I do regret the focus of those years. Instead of reading for language I could plug into Lacanian psychoanalysis, I should have been noticing, for instance, how many plots in the history of the novel center around the fallout from an unplanned pregnancy (a lot of them). Or, on the other hand, how many scenes in the canon depict farting ( not a lot of them). To rectify this oversight, a few years ago, my friend Cassey Lottman and I created the Great Farts of Literature database, an ongoing project dedicated to cataloging the best butt bombs in print and from which this list is adapted.…