What is Home? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah & Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem

In this course, Premise students will explore the question: “What is home?”

We will read two works that will help us get at the enduring questions of home, displacement, and the ways we attempt to create and recreate home throughout our lives.

Class Session 1 : Sunday, January 23, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST
First, we will read a selection of Joan Didion’s essays about home and dislocation in her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Next, students will read essays from the collection, including On Going Home (1967). Didion struggles with the difficulties of going back home to her family in the Central Valley of California and how uneasy it makes her return “home.”

Didion’s collection of essays captures the unique time and place of her focus. She explores subjects such as growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: “[Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

Class Session 2: Sunday, April 3, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST
Next, we will read and discuss the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel tells the story of two Nigerians making their way in the U.S. and the UK. It raises enduring questions of belonging, the overseas experience for the African diaspora, and the search for identity and a home.

“Adichie, born in Nigeria but now living both in her homeland and in the United States, is an extraordinarily self-aware thinker and writer, possessing the ability to lambaste society without sneering or patronizing, or polemicizing. For her, it seems no great feat to balance high-literary intentions with broad social critique. “Americanah” examines blackness in America, Nigeria, and Britain, but it’s also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience — a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of Adichie’s observations.” - New York Times Book Review, 2013

Instructor: Mary Finn
Class dates and times:
Sunday, January 23, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST
Sunday, April 3, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST

Registration fee: $35