Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022;55(4):519-535.
doi: 10.1007/s11007-022-09579-8. Epub 2022 Aug 18.

Moments of realization: extending Homeworld in British-African Novelist Doris Lessing's Four-Gated City

David Seamon  1
Affiliations

Moments of realization: extending Homeworld in British-African Novelist Doris Lessing's Four-Gated City

David Seamon. Cont Philos Rev. 2022.

Abstract

For Husserl, the homeworld is the tacit, taken-for-granted sphere of experiences, understanding, and situations marking out a world that is comfortable, usual, and "the way things are and should be." Always, according to Husserl, the homeworld is in some mode of lived mutuality with an alienworld-a world as seen as a realm of difference, atypicality, and otherness. In this article, I draw on British-African novelist Doris Lessing's 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, to consider the shifting homeworld of protagonist Martha Quest, a young white African woman emigrating to battle-scarred London immediately after World War II. Throughout the novel, Quest finds herself in unfamiliar or challenging situations where the world she takes for granted is called into question. Lessing draws on these life-testing experiences to portray Quest's shifting understandings of other individuals' homeworlds that at first she sees as atypical, abnormal, or unreal.

Keywords: Doris Lessing; Edmund Husserl; Homeworld; Lifeworld; Mental illness; Natural attitude; Phenomenology.; The Four-Gated City.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Allen Jeffner. Introduction to Husserl’s “Renewal: Its Problem and Method.”. In: McCormick Peter, Elliston Frederick A., editors. Husserl: Shorter Works. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press; 1981. pp. 324–325.
    1. Beja Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press; 1971.
    1. Bertelsen, Eve. 1994. Acknowledging a New Frontier [interview with Doris Lessing, originally 1984]. In Ingersoll, Earl G., ed., 1994. Doris Lessing: Conversations, pp. 120–145. Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press [also published as Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964–1994. London: Flamingo, 1996].
    1. Bloom, Harold, ed. 2003. Doris Lessing. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House.
    1. Brazil Kevin, Sergeant David, Sperlinger Tom., editors. Doris Lessing and the Forming of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2018.

LinkOut - more resources