Consolidated Research Group on Creation and Thinking of Women
Universitat de Barcelona
This project will provide a theory of the troubled relationship of the American self with the domestic space, a relationship that constitutes a core concern of American literature
(Chandler). It will do so by applying the epistemological tools of Domestic Space Studies (Briganti and Mezei), a discipline resulting from the spatial and affective turns in the Humanities, to the praxis of literary analysis. Our opening double, question, is «What is the nature of the critical relationship between the American self and domestic space, and what does it reveal about the unique relationship between self and belonging in the American experience?» The project will analyze the specific valences of power of the domestic space (Marx, Foucault) and the house as social system of transmission of conservative ideology (McDowell, Stea) while, conversely, and concurrently, of potential resistance to it (hooks, Jaggar, M. Friedman).It will also analyze the crisis in the binary of functioning self and idiosyncratic self in the domestic (Lefebvre, Benjamin, Morley), the struggle between intimacy (Segarra) and exposure to “the realm of the far” (Bauman), and the relation between the haunting memory of past homes and the construction of subjectivity (Bachelard), issues with clear social ethical, moral, and political repercussions.