Meditations on Exile and Home / Fall 2005 / Interview

Contemporary Notions of Home

Interview with Witold Rybczynski

Jennifer L. Geddes and Witold Rybczynski

Architectural elements from the La Roque Mansion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Jennifer L. Geddes

Jennifer L. Geddes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her areas of research include evil and suffering, the Holocaust, ethics, critical theory, twentieth-century literature, and religion and culture. Previously, she was the editor of The Hedgehog Review.

Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of more than twenty books including the Olmsted biography, A Clearing in the Distance, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

How have our notions of home shifted over the last twenty years since you wrote your book, Home: A Short History of an Idea (1987)?

Henry Kissinger once asked Mao Tse-Tung if he thought the French Revolution was a success. “I think it’s too early to tell,” answered the Chairman. Cultural ideas evolve at a glacial pace so twenty years is not a long time for something as deeply rooted as our notion of home. is is worth emphasizing, since the media is forever telling us that fads and fashions are “changing our world.” Maybe—or maybe not.

To read the full article online, please login to your account or subscribe to our digital edition ($25 yearly). Prefer print? Order back issues or subscribe to our print edition ($30 yearly).

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 7.3 (Fall 2005). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

Meditations on Exile and Home / Fall 2005 / Interview

Contemporary Notions of Home

Interview with Witold Rybczynski

Jennifer L. Geddes and Witold Rybczynski

Sign up for our newsletter