Kathrin Hartmann

Academic CV

“On the Road” or “On the Street”: Homelessness in American Fiction

The dissertation examines the poetics of homelessness fiction in the American literary tradition. The guiding principle is Georg Lukács’s notion (stated in his Theory of the Novel) that genre is susceptible to a “historico-philosophical dialectic.” While homelessness persists as a trope throughout the western literary canon (with empirical homelessness acting as a metaphor for what Lukács deems “transcendental homelessness,” and the journey from or toward home functioning as a narrative instrument to generate the story), the question ensues of how these narrative conventions fare ethically and aesthetically in the literature of a nation like the United States where homelessness is not merely a metaphor, but a severe social and ecological problem with a plurality of manifestations. The thesis, therefore, posits that the current shift in the demographics of homelessness, due to the subprime mortgage crisis and the covid-19 pandemic, creates an “historico-philosophical dialectic” in the contradiction between the enduring American ideology of upward mobility and the blatant historical reality of its fictionality. Consequently, the project reassess the conventions of American homelessness fiction (as a genre in its own right), and thereby expounds upon a uniquely American poetics of homelessness.

Thesis advisor is Professor Dr. Klaus Benesch, Chair of the Department of North America Studies and American Literature at LMU