Call for papers

Villa, suburban lot, secondary residence, mansion, haunted house, log cabin – the house is a recurring figure through American literature, cinema and TV series. If the “Great American Novel” (often pointed out as an elusive critical object) fails to be clearly and straightforwardly defined, the American house yet asserts itself, from Cooper to Danielewski, as one of its structuring metaphors. In Morrison’s Beloved, 124 is a haunted place that brings America back to its slaveholding past; Hawthorne’s house of the seven gables harbors the bloody ghosts of Puritanism; both gawdy and sublime, Gatsby’s villa embodies the paradox of a dream that would be “material without being real;” while Faulkner’s The Mansion mirrors, on a larger scale, America’s “house divided,” unable to put to rest a war that still fractures the country. The house thus stands as a synecdoche used to conceptualize the nation itself. Unified or fragmented, it functions as a mirror of America itself; its destiny is tied to that of the great family sagas and thus allows to consider simultaneously heredity, territory, and property.

The political dimension of the house and of the social structure it relies on deserves to be examined both in fiction and non-fiction. Who owns a house and who is excluded from property? This question runs through the United States’ history from the first instances of colonization to the current housing crisis. One could also wonder how literature and cinema deal with renting and tenants: who are those that do not own the place they live in and what is their relationship to it? From Steinbeck’s (and Ford’s) sharecroppers in Grapes of Wrath to the motel dwellers of The Florida Project (Sean Baker), the precarious situation of the characters seems to prompt the narrative forward. It also raises political issues, bringing about and fueling several forms of marginalization within the nation and the narrative, as in Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland and its movie adaptation by Chloé Zhao. The growing popularity of reality TV which focuses on a house (Two Chicks and a Hammer, HGTV channel, real-estate or interior-design shows) reflects a form of obsession with owning, bequeathing, setting up, and living in the American house.

Building one’s house, inhabiting it and protecting it, flourishing and withering in it: literature keeps staging houses and how they redefine the space they are built on. From its inception, the North American nation was founded on the fencing of plots appropriated from the wilderness, and, thus, from indigenous people, nature, and the devil. These first pioneer settlements, dearly fought for and erected, reinforce a certain vision of Americanness as agonistic, between man and the hostile external world. The American house was therefore initially conceived of as a place where Christian morals and civilization may be (re)established, and as a pocket of resistance against the onslaughts of a fiendish and fascinating nature, as well as its various avatars. It has successively been standing as a sanctuary against the natives, a part of the City upon a Hill envisioned by Puritan writings, an expression of white domination over enslaved populations both in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Flynn’s Sharp Objects, an ideal of quiet domestic life in the suburbs, removed from urban crime and violence, or a fortified castle, besieged by deranged figures invading family life, as in the TV show Criminal Minds.

The house, as the ultimate seat of intimacy, is at the heart of family and collective crises and stories. Gradually, it becomes clear that what threatens the house is not so much external as internal: enemies, both real and metaphorical, both individual and common, have been coming back and haunting it from Poe’s publication of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” from the basement (in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and Jordan Peele’s Get Out) to the attic in Hereditary, directed by Ari Aster.

As metaphors for the mind (with the progressive conceptualization of the subconscious and of the psyche as an architecture), these houses offer many self-reflective frames and cast a specific light upon the characters’ inner lives (“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman), or upon a certain vision of literature (did not Henry James coin the “house of fiction” with its million windows?). Faulkner, for his part, likens the writer’s craft to that of a carpenter, thus allowing for a spatial approach of the text as a framework made of surfaces, beams, and partitions. Once one begins paying attention to the house’s literal structure, what might be embodied by the living room, parental suite, basement, attic, garage, kitchen, or storeroom? And how not to be compelled by the symbolical power of thresholds, façades and openings?  

Presentations might, for example, explore the following research questions:

•  What is specific about the American house in literary and on-screen representations? In fiction and non-fiction?
• How can we understand the difference between “house” and “home”? Should “home”be seen as having more to do with affect and “house”with concrete space?
• The house as the locus of political thinking, and a reflection of social, racial, and gender inequalities.
• The house as a mirror held to the nation and to American history, as a place where the conflicts that are essential to America tend to crystallize: which analogies can be drawn between house, psyche, family structure, social environment, and American history? And what are the limits to this analogical model?
• The house as a showcase for the American dream.
• Is the house the symbol of a withdrawal from the external world or on the contrary of a seizure of public space for one’s own private use?
• The house and its relationship to its immediate environment: how does it relate to the space it stands on?
• Besieged or haunted houses, derelict houses, houses in ruins, empty houses (be they for sale, for show, sealed off, or for rent): what can be said of houses that no longer fulfil their original function?
• What is the underbelly of the “American house” fantasy? Who is excluded from it? Which representations are possible for those who do not own a house? Which marginalized processes of recreation can be identified as reinvesting or reinventing this fantasy, from the “houses” that battle in the ball-rooms of the voguing scene, to the mobile homes of Cheap Land Colorado by Conover?
• From which ideology does the American house proceed from, and which ideologies does it shape in return, be they hegemonic or not?