Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow
About
“The Fiction of Dwelling”
What is home? What does home do? What does it mean to feel at home, and can one feel at home in the world today? The Fiction of Dwelling explores these questions through twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, where home has often been culturally and politically tied to property ownership. My research shows how literature imagines dwelling otherwise. Moving beyond economic definitions, I frame dwelling as a literary, cultural, and philosophical problem that touches on race, gender, nature, and the human condition. Drawing on literature from the rural pampas, urban peripheries, and Amazonian frontiers, I trace how fiction reflects and contests the pressures of capitalism and environmental collapse, offering a critical vantage point from which to think dwelling not as a stable or given condition, but as a fragile and embattled relation to place and humanity.
Ana Guimarães is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures.
