Dwelling in a Global Age: An Introduction

This essay introduces a cluster of essays that address the question of dwelling in a global age. Although their shared point of departure is Heidegger’s 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” each explores how Heidegger’s meditations manifest in modern and postmodern fiction and how questions of dwelling resonate in our present globalized moment. Who dwells—or can stake a claim to dwelling—in neoliberal Europe, in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger, in Trump’s America? Together, the collected essays explore how modern fiction stakes a claim for Being in the world, for both the lives it portrays and literature itself.