The Architecture of Longing: Objects, Affect, and the Poetics of Home in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (original) (raw)

Strange Dwellings: Inhabiting American Literary Modernism

2015

This dissertation probes the relationship between sexuality and the home in American literature from the early twentieth century, asserting forms of dwelling that challenge the values given to itinerancy and vagrancy in criticism on queer modernism. Within queer theory, which since its inception has prescribed an antisocial , anti-normative position, scholars have mined modernist texts for their transgressive potential. Indeed, modernist texts frequently exhibit precisely the qualities that American culture negatively associates with queerness: urbanism, exile, dislocation, disorientation, loss, and infertility. However, I argue that narratives of queerness that privilege antisocial behaviour risk occluding more granular discussions of the murky relationships that queer subjects have with ordinariness and normativity. The basic premise of "Strange Dwellings" is, therefore, that sexuality in American modernism indexes a range of concomitant concerns and anxieties, including a pervasive fascination with home. Affective ambivalence permeates many of the texts in this project, which simultaneously express profound nostalgia and strain toward new aesthetic, social, and political realities. While the home may find its form in the house, home is ultimately an affective state, I conclude, rather than a material space. I redirect our attention to the ways in which modernist texts refuse to assimilate iii to traditional social and literary formations, and yet strive to recuperate and transform them. "Strange Dwellings" examines instantiations of the queer home in texts by F.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 5 Vol.14 2024 May

David Publishing Company, 2024

This essay analyses Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie through the lens of cultural studies, examining the portrayal of domesticity and the quest for an ideal home in late-nineteenth-century America. It explores the complex relationships between the main characters, Carrie and Hurstwood, and their families, as well as their struggles with materialism and alienation. Through close analysis of societal context, the characters' familial backgrounds and emotional yearnings, the essay delves into the characters' longing for stability and belonging and their journey toward understanding the true essence of dwelling amidst the changing urban landscape. It argues that Dreiser's novel critiques the superficial pursuit of material comforts and highlights the importance of introspection and self-discovery in finding lasting happiness amidst societal turmoil. Ultimately, through the prism of domesticity, the essay delves into broader themes of identity, belonging, and existential fulfillment in a heartless society marked by materialism and alienation.

Identity Statement: Home, (Be)Longing, and Identity in Imagined Landscapes

2021

This entry of the student anthology was created through a process of reflecting on a literary seminar carried out by the Center for Inter-American Studies from the University of Graz and was inspired by the work in Marjorie Agosín edited volume Home – An Imagined Landscape. The identity statement aims at providing an overview of the student anthology and contextualizes the publication within the academic framework of the "Off Campus: Seggau School of Thought" book series and the Center for Inter-American Studies (CIAS) at the University of Graz

Introduction: Yearning and Tending Amid Change

Movable Gardens: Iteneraries and Sanctuaries of Memory, 2021

Say tomorrow doesn't come. Say the moon becomes an icy pit. Say the sweet-gum tree is petri ed. Say the sun's a foul black tire re. Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks. Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain. Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter. Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse. Say we never get to see it: bright future, stuck like a bum star, never coming close, never dazzling. Say we never meet her. Never him. Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. Say, it doesn't matter. Say, that would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.

The City and the Soul: American Architecture and the Good Life

When Socrates constructed his metaphorical city in the Republic, he introduced western civilization to the idea that the virtue of the polis is somehow connected to that of the individual. This is a lovely notion, with many interesting implications. Socrates, of course, was interested in justice, and he looked to see where justice occurs in the city so that he could determine how it might exist in the individual soul. But the present investigation endeavors to answer a much broader question: to what extent do cities and buildings affect the people in them?