Home on the Horizon
HOME ON THE HORIZON (Peter Lang, 2010) tells the story of America’s relationship to its home life. Moving from the nineteenth-century homestead of Emily Dickinson to the motel rooms and basement spaces of Bob Dylan’s lyrics and paintings, the book investigates the relationship of America’s domestic frontier to the wide-open spaces of its outdoors.
At the centre of the book is the often-shifting domain of the domestic threshold: Emily Dickinson's doorstep, Edward Hopper's doors and windows, and Harper Lee's front porch. Home on the Horizon traces these historically fragile territories through contemporary literature and film, including Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford - works that explore local, domestic territories as emblems of nation. The potent spaces of the American home - the hearth, porch, backyard, front lawn, bathroom, and basement - are positioned in relation to the remote and often outsider sites of the American motel and hotel.
