ABSTRACT
Cultural markers like childhood haunts and hometown fixtures can become almost unrecognizable over time for any number of reasons. Adults loom over children, siblings create a pecking order, aunts, uncles, and grandparents carry a whiff of someplace poorer or richer, and certainly older. Literature, however, has the advantage of being able to embrace larger swathes of time and space than most of us could ever hope to cover. The chapter shows how things as disparate as cardboard boxes, fireworks, bridges, coins, comic books, dining room chairs, and city parks can make us feel at home or far away, or both at once. In the opening monologue to his 1989 film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, the filmmaker Wim Wenders captures the poignancy of being both part of and apart from culture in a society that prizes individual identity. In addition to real and imagined geographies, the dynamics of wealth and poverty are critical facets of culture and identity.
