| This dissertation traces the historical development of American narratives of homelessness and the postmodern home during the 1960s and after. I argue that these popular stories were crucial in navigating the economic inequity and social challenges of the era. The postmodern socioeconomic climate produced a well-documented sense of metaphoric homelessness among the privileged classes, a feeling articulated in a wide-variety of popular stories, but perhaps most quintessentially in postmodern narratives of the road and the American West. Stories of the postmodern home, traced here in literature, the news media, film and personal accounts, made use of older road stories in order to navigate the demands for mobility, using their familiar tropes to find comfort in a mobile, narrative and transferable sense of home on the gentrified road. This dissertation argues that while such narratives performed the crucial cultural work of helping the privileged classes establish a sense of home within the "unhomed" postmodern world, they also simultaneously, if unwittingly, helped to eradicate older class narratives, producing narrative consequences that mimic urban gentrification. Narratives of metaphoric homelessness are shown to be essential to the shape of new stories of poverty and economic inequality, which coalesced under the term "homelessness" in the 1980s. These stories did not narrate homelessness as it was experienced by the poor. Instead, they imagined the homeless as expressions of mainstream experience and fears. In so doing, they further marginalized the actually homeless, justifying and denying their economic inequality. Through aesthetic means, popular narratives negated homeless people's individual identities and made their existence on the street seem "natural." This study questions and theorizes such narratives as they appear in a variety of genres, including literary fiction, print journalism, film, alternative media and oral history. It uses fieldwork and interviews conducted among people who have actually experienced homelessness as a means of critique for analyzing more privileged narratives, valuing their unique and often unheard perspective on our larger cultural stories. |
