The Architecture of Longing: Objects, Affect, and the Poetics of Home in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the concept of “home” is a key site for negotiating twentieth-century anxieties about individual and national identity. Taking up various cultural productions such as novels, world’s fairs, advertisements, and museum exhibitions, this project contends that the idea of home has been an important site for negotiating these anxieties at particular moments in U.S. cultural history. Located in the fields of literary and material culture studies, this project examines how objects, both fictional and real, reveal hidden fantasies and untold stories of the national past and present. With examples ranging from a log cabin on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition and a China figurine in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), to early home television sets (1950s), an electric lamp in a contemporary Ikea advertisement (2003), or an assortment of domestic commodities on display in the National Building Museum’s 2012 House & Home exhibition in Washington D.C., each chapter traces the processes by which domestic material culture, in physical and literary form, comes to embody and express ambivalent national sentiments surrounding ideas of tradition and technology, nostalgia and progress, exclusion and belonging. As each of these categories are always inflected with particular notions of gender, race, class, and citizenship, I argue that it is through various deployments of “home” that these major themes and debates within American cultural studies continue to be played out and performed. In bringing these texts, sites, and objects together to outline a complex affective economy of home, this research opens up an important area of inquiry that acknowledges both the material and symbolic geographies that inform diverse formations of individual and national identity.