English 470A: Canadian Literary Genres

After reading from a variety of student blogs, I have composed a cursory list of the major themes, images, emotions and so forth considered by my peers to constitute home:

• Home suggests familiar physical surroundings and sensory perceptions. Sights, scents, sounds.
• Though home is often predicated on the physically tangible, many people make note of the fact that home is also an emotional state. An inward feeling.
• The physical and psychological reality of home is not anchored solely in the presence of ones private property, but within a broader community. Home is constituted by other people, in the presence of family members or friends, providing a form of “social capital“.
• Though home may be embodied in static structures, objects, landscapes and so forth, this is an orthodox conception of home which is oftentimes unfamiliar. Rather, home is, for many,  an unfixed site, a state of fluidity and simultenaety,  the locus of perpetual movement, growth, change.
• One of the most commonly cited perceptions of home espouses a location, whether physical or psychological or both, that one creates for oneself for oneself.

Ultimately, I identify strongly with the majority of these common associations. There are numerous qualities cited less frequently that I find equally central to my definition of home, such as a shared, familiar language. In foreign countries I often feel lost, not so much in unfamiliar geography as in an unfamiliar culture or dialect. At these times, discovering a fellow English speaker or material written in English functions like a welcome injection of “home” into a world otherwise composed of “elsewhere”.

Works Cited:

Lee, Chloe. “2.2 Home”. Chloe’s Blog For English 470. 28 Sept. 2016, https://blogs.ubc.ca/470chloe/2016/09/28/2-2-home/. Web.

Woo, Patrick. “Canada Is My Home And Not–Assignment 2:2”. We Are In The Same Boat. 28 Sept. 2016, https://blogs.ubc.ca/patrickwoo/2016/09/28/canada-is-my-home-and-not-assignment-22/. Web.