Home, wrote Robert Frost, is the place where, when you have to
go there, they have to take you in. And yet the idea of home has,
in the modern world, become extremely problematic.
Robert Frost's words tellingly illustrate the centrality of home
to the human experience, as an unconditional haven that one simply
has, without having to earn.
Yet, we live at a time when the idea of home has become
extremely problematic. Our homeless fill America's streets and
shelters; the comfort of home is increasingly threatened by urban
violence; and the world-wide plight of those exiled or fleeing from
their homelands due to civil war, starvation, or political
repression seems relentless.
The idea of home, bound as it is in family and in the roles of
men and women, has a deep resonance that is not fully captured by
its use as a social and political slogan. What is its history and
ideology? What has it meant and how has its meaning changed? Home
moves us perhaps most powerfully as absence or negation.
Homelessness and exile are among the worst of conditions, bringing
with them alienation, estrangement, and the feelings of greatest
despair.
This volume, based on a multi-institutional collaboration
between the New School for Social Research and five major New York
City museums, and its resulting conference, convenes many of
America's top scholarly minds to address historical and
contemporary meanings of home. Among the issues specifically
addressed are the artistic rendition of home in art and propaganda;
literary meanings of home; exile through the ages; homelessness
past; homelessness in Dickens; the homeless in New York City
history; alienation and belonging; slavery and the female discovery
of personal freedom; and, more generally, the home and family in
historical perspective.
Contributing to the volume are Breyten Breytenbach, David
Bromwich (Yale University), Sanford Budick (Hebrew University of
Jerusalem), Stanley Cavell (Harvard University), Mary Douglas,
Tamara K. Hareven (University of Delaware), Eric Hobsbawm
(Cambridge University, Emeritus), John Hollander (Yale University),
Kim Hopper (Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research),
George Kateb (Princeton University), Alexander Keyssar (Duke
University), Steven Marcus (Columbia University), Orlando Patterson
(Harvard University), Joseph Rykwert (University of Pennsylvania),
Simon Schama (Harvard University), Alan Trachtenberg (Yale
University), and Gwendolyn Wright (Columbia University).
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