Homesick: everyday life in the short story

Abstract

In everyday spaces, both public and domestic, daily routines are consciously or subconsciously adopted and performed with ‘something closer to inattention and distraction’ (Highmore, 2004, p. 309); as such, the everyday in which we spend most of our lives disappears into the background. In modernist fiction, the disruption of these routines – a ‘rupture’ of the everyday – is what allows us a ‘glimpse of our actual relationship to our imagined existence’ (Leonard, 2001).

In Homesick, a collection of short stories, disruptions draw attention to the spaces and rhythms of the everyday, revealing disappointments and shortcomings and presenting characters with opportunities to re-examine aspects of their daily life hitherto taken for granted. Set in Singapore, the stories explore secondary themes such as gender, memory, family, and growing up, largely from a female (and often feminist) point of view. A primary theme of home – the dissolution of, departure from, or discovery of it – runs constant throughout the stories in Homesick, and at the end of each story the characters, finding their relationship to the home changed, must reconsider what home means or could be.

The accompanying exegesis will examine the short story form and the treatment of the everyday in modernist literature, and includes a critical commentary on the short stories in Homesick. The exegesis will make reference to works by major modernist writers and a variety of short story writers from realist to contemporary.