Module description
This Interdisciplinary Humanities module will explore concepts and representations of ‘home’ and ‘work’ -arguably twin poles around which modern adult life is organised - and the boundaries and connections between the two. It will focus on domestic space as a setting and source for creative and knowledge work, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Whether Virginia Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ or bell hooks’ ‘Homeplace’, the material and spatial intermingling of public and private domains, roles, and identities have been and continue to be a key preoccupation of many thinkers, writers, scholars, and artists.
The home-work relationship is key to pressing social, environmental, psychological, and economic questions ,impacting on issues of equality and inequality; prosperity and deprivation; efficiency and productivity; interiority and selfhood; status and identity; sustainability; community and family; and individual happiness. It has especially formed a major strand of feminist thought since the nineteenth century, and has been explored from multiple perspectives in disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, art history, cultural and social history, architecture and design studies ,geography, and gender studies. ‘The home’, previously overlooked as a site of social and cultural meaning, has itself emerged in recent decades as a major area of interdisciplinary enquiry.
In this module we will focus particularly on the types of ‘work’ centred by the Humanities, namely creative and cultural labour, its textual and artistic products, and related material cultures and practices of knowledge production. We will explore what literary and artistic representations of the home as both living space and workspace, and broader ideas and ideologies of domesticity and the politics of our home lives, tell us about our key concepts of ‘home’ and ‘work’, their varied and shifting cultural meanings, and the tense but generative relationship between them. As part of this module, students will have opportunity to apply their learning in the context of a London museum exhibition relating to the module’s themes.
Assessment details
Coursework essay - 800 words (30%)
Coursework essay - 2000 words (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module will enable the student to develop deeper understanding of two important and socially relevant interdisciplinary concepts in the study of the Arts and Humanities, ‘home’ and ‘work’, of the changing relationship between the two from the nineteenth century to the present day, and of how this understanding affects our interpretation of relevant cultural and intellectual work.
Learning outcomes
Knowledge and understanding
- Understand the changing cultural and social meanings of the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and the relationship between them, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Intellectual skills
- Analyse and interpret how the home has been represented in literature and art, and understand the broader cultural implications of these representations.
- Explore how domestic space as a material and cultural site informs relevant creative and knowledge work, in the context of changing ideas and ideologies of domesticity.
Transferable skills
- Communicate ideas effectively in writing.
Teaching pattern
20 hours of seminars/tutorial
Suggested reading list
Homi Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’, Social Text31/32 (1992), pp.141-153.
James Krasner, Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Space (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010).
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; and, Three Guineas, ed. Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
bell hooks, ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990).
Christina Nippert-Eng, Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale, 2006).
Michael Remblis, ed, Disabling Domesticity (London: Palgrave, 2016).
Johan Jarlbrink & Charlie Järpvall, eds, Deskbound Cultures: Media and Materialities at Work (Riga: Livonia Print, 2022).
Bex Harper and Hollie Price, eds, Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures (London: Palgrave, 2017).
Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them (New York & London: Routledge, 2004).
Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).
Jane Hamlett, ed, A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft, eds, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Rodopi: Amsterdam; New York, 2006).
Deborah Chambers, Cultural Ideals of Home: The Social Dynamics of Domestic Space (London: Routledge, 2020).
Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, eds, The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2012).