Special Issue: Unhousing (in) American Literature, Textual Practice, 39 (12)

This special issue analyses how American writers have developed notions of unhousing as the symptom of a core national anxiety; as the product of systematic (cultural) evictions and removals; as the possibility of new forms of radical openness and emancipated subjectivities; and as the possibility to transcend the domestic understood as the national. The essays that make up the issue examine the political valences of how the instability of physical and/or political unhousing may result in new modes of more open relationalities and habitabilities beyond the domestic and domesticated, as well as in alternative subjectivities such as those of the transient, the squatter, the migrant, the wanderer, the communitarian, the socialist, the utopian, the universalist, and the subject ready to exit to the world and, from ontological exposure and fragility, choose to live for others.

CONTENTS

Unhousing (in) American Literature, Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Rodrigo Andrés, and Michael Jonik   1823-1830

Affect, precarity, unhousing: reading trends in twenty-first-century US literature, Dolores Resano   1831-1854

Stepping out of the house: radical unhousing as political resistance in George Saunders, Cristina Alsina Rísquez   1855-1869

Fire escapes: queer unhousing in Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Ocean Vuong, Rodrigo Andrés   1870-1884

Property and precarisation: re-reading Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood and Fly’s CHRON!ICRIOTS!PA!SM!, Cynthia Strech   1885-1911

Playing with fire: unhousing and unsettlement at the antebellum hearthside, Nicholas Spengler   1912-1933

Disburdening the house, liberating the self: narratives of domestic discomfort and unhousing in Henry James’s late short fiction, David Fontanals   1934-1952

Radical openness against African American Houses of Law: Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills and the rhetoric of decline, Vicent Cucarella-Ramon   1953-1968

At home in a racist universe: weird phenomenology and cosmic alterity in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, Ian Green   1969-1991

Unhousing and unhoming: the politics of space in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Elena Ortells   1992-2003

Unhousing in literary representations of Alzheimer’s Disease, Cristina Garrigós   2004-2016