| This dissertation explores facets of the contemporary occasion (often referred to as “postmodernism”) constituting a condition of “being at home in the not at home,” which, I argue, emerges just prior to the end of the Second World War. Out of the destruction of World War II a new ontology develops which calls into question the once sacredly held truths of the Enlightenment-generated form of narrative structure, which is simultaneously end-oriented and grounded in a logic of enclosure. Taking as my point of departure Martin Heidegger's statement that “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world,” and the notion of “home” in general, I will draw a hypothetical line of thought among authors Primo Levi, Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, and Italo Calvino—writers who I see as representative of a new, postmodern ontology whose condition constitutes an “existence of textuality,” which is directly proportional to what Freud called the unheimlich. Moreover, I pay particular attention to the exilic status of Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie; each of whom represents an exilic figure who has made writing his adopted home. Although this dissertation focuses primarily on literature, I also explore various cultural, historical, and political sites, as well as modes of consciousness determining the turn toward a postmodern ontology that is grounded in textuality. The text begins to take on the manifestations of a home in a way that is made impossible in the “real” world. |
