Resisting the Place of Belonging

People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.

Daniel Boscaljon, Instructor, University of Iowa, USA.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Uncanny Homecomings: Becoming Unsettled in Religion, Narrative, and Art, Daniel Boscaljon; Part I Uncanny Homecomings; Chapter 1a Knowing for the First Time, David Jasper; Chapter 2 Staying Found, Christopher Merrill; Part II Unsettling Foundations of Homes; Chapter 3 Homecoming and the Half-Remembered: Environmental Amnesia, the Uncanny and the Path Home, Forrest Clingerman; Chapter 4 Dwelling Beyond Poetry: The Uncanny Houses of Hawthorne and Poe, Daniel Boscaljon; Chapter 5 The Paradox of Homecoming: Home is Where the Haunt is, Kimberly Carfore; Chapter 6 Uncanny Courage and Theological Home, Verna Marina Ehret; Chapter 7 ALT + HOME: Digital Homecomings, Rachel Wagner; Chapter 8 Faith or Friendship: On Integrating Dimensions of Self-realization in Kierkegaard and Aristotle, Nathan Eric Dickman; Chapter 9 Homecoming as Damnation, Thomas J.J. Altizer; Part III Uncanny Mediations of Homecomings; Chapter 10 Revolt Against the City? Art and Home in Iowa, Joni L. Kinsey; Chapter 11 Domestic Doubles, Generic Cities and the Urban Uncanny: Constructing Home in Synecdoche, New York and Marwencol, Michael Baltutis; Chapter 12 Phenomenology and Uncanny Homecomings: Homeworld, Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan Ball's HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under, David Seamon; Chapter 13 Coming Home and Places of Mourning, Janet Donohoe; Chapter 14 Poetic Habitats, Impossible Homecomings, Hanna Janiszewska; Chapter 15 When the Dead Share the Table: The Uncanny Colonial Home in James Joyce's The Dead, Ayesha Malik;