Unhomely Wests - (Postwestern Horizons) by Stephen Tatum

About the Book

Incorporating readings of key cultural texts from the environmental humanities, studies of globalization and economics, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, and feminist theory, Stephen Tatum addresses the ongoing crises of displacement and loss of home in the modern urban West.

Book Synopsis

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," Tatum's 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, Tatum's 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 history's apparitional revenants, this collection of essays--comprising a new lexicon of unhomely Wests--conveys a hauntology underwritten by spectrality as a theme, a trope, an image. Committed to revising the conventional academic text, Unhomely Wests exemplifies Roland Barthes's directive that we consider the alphabetic order as a call to "Cut! Resume the story in another way!"

Review Quotes

"Unhomely Wests offers scholars and public intellectuals an important new means for approaching critical regional studies. In this engaging and insightful work, Stephen Tatum provides an innovative model for assessing the complexities of life under ecologically destructive and dehumanizing conditions that are shaping the region today."--Susan Kollin, author of Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West

"Given that both its content and its form can help us think more expansively about the U.S. West and about the concepts of homelessness and unhomeliness that sit at the center of this study, Unhomely Wests is an important and necessary book. Its approach and structure are unique and compelling, as is its centering of certain key concepts."--Sylvan Goldberg, professor of English at Colorado College

About the Author

Stephen Tatum is professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah and the author and editor of several books, including Morta Las Vegas: "CSI" and the Problem of the West (Nebraska, 2017) with Nathaniel Lewis; In the Remington Moment (Nebraska, 2010); and Reading "The Virginian" in the New West (Nebraska, 2003) with Melody Graulich.