This course takes the current social problem of homelessness as a starting place for an inquiry into the significance of figurations of home and homelessness in the contemporary world. Home is a place of comfort and belonging; it is a domestic setting, a language, a nationality and a series of identifications that ‘place’ and maintain individuals. The notion of home is opposed to key diagnoses of the modern condition–as alienated, displaced, estranged and uncanny, for example. These diagnoses have been applied both to psychological conditions and to actual social phenomena of mass displacements, refugees, immigration and exile. The social imaginary of many historically displaced groups centres around the return to or establishment of a homeland. This course will consider literary and artistic representations of ‘home’, the phenomenology of ‘homeliness’ and of its strange double, the uncanny, and the stakes that post-war philosophy has in the notions of rootedness, place and dwelling.
