Home: A Place in the World - Softcover

Mack, Arien

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814755267 ISBN 13: 9780814755266

Publisher: NYU Press, 1995

Synopsis

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).

About this title

About the Author:

Arien Mack is Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, editor of the journal Social Research, and editor of In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease, also published by NYU Press.

Review:

"[E]ngaging and provocative. [Aims] to stimulate the Left through an injection of new ideas. To the extent that these ideas challenge what some see as core Leftist convictions, some on the Left - those who are content to stay the course and await the coming revolution - will not welcome them. But those who see the Left at a critical crossroads, who believe that its recent political failures have amplified the need for the Left to reinvent and revitalize itself, will certainly find these ideas worth consideration... [Berube has] done valuable work in clearing the way for a more intellectually innovative and politically effective Left."-Marx & Philosophy,

"If Berube succeeds in making leftists, from center-left politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank all the way out to the most radical anarchists, ponder the question of violence seriously, he will have done an inestimable service. That he attempts to do just that makes the most important book I have read in the past five years."-John McGowan in Symploke,

"The most important book I have read in the past fiver years."-John McGowan,

"Indefatigably clear-minded and relentlessly researched, Berube's The Left at War offers an invaluable excavation of just what has gone wrong, and occasionally right, with the academic/intellectual left in America. Anyone concerned with its future will be relying on this work for many years to come."
-Eric Alterman, author of "Why We're Liberals"

"A rigorous, hard-hitting, and impressively detailed critique and account of the United States left during wartime--and at war with itself. It is far and away the most thoroughly reasoned and researched brief for a middle way between a predictably anti-imperialist left and a revoltingly hawkish liberalism, and in this it is immensely useful both as a guide to recent debates and as a sort of internationalist handbook. Rousing, engrossing, principled, and brave."
-Eric Lott, author of "The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual"

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0814755267
• ISBN 13: 9780814755266
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 294