Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z

In Unhomely Wests Stephen Tatum presents twenty-six essays exploring selected literary, visual art, cinematic, and musical representations of homelessness as a theme, a trope, an affliction, a threat, and a condition of alienation in the late modern and postmodern American West. Arranged in alphabetical order, from Alphabet/Abecedario to Zombieland, Tatums essays aim to discover how his eclectic selection of texts both produce uncanny literary effects and bear witness to the entangled capitalist, geopolitical, and ecological crises that shape our external world and our unhomely textual worlds.

In keeping with the etymological and conceptual linkage between the unhomely and the uncanny, Tatums critical meditations focus on both uncanny textual architectures and architecturally unhomely junkspaces of abandonment and ruin, of corporeal displacement, and of cognitive or affective disorientation. And since an emergent unhomely structure of feeling exposes how our lived present is saturated with historys apparitional revenants, this collection of essayscomprising a new lexicon of unhomely Westsconveys a hauntology underwritten by spectrality as a theme, a trope, an image. Committed to revising the conventional academic text, Unhomely Wests exemplifies Roland Barthess directive that we consider the alphabetic order as a call to Cut! Resume the story in another way! See more