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Are we certain we know what it means to be at home, or away from home? How familiar are we with the experience of travelling and to the extent that we are, do we ever travel? Deconstruction At Home: Metaphors of Travel and Writing departs from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to confront philosophical reflection on the notions of house and travel with questions raised by cultural, literary and post-colonial theory. The book argues that contemporary experiences of travel and displacement as well as contemporary discourse on travel and travel writing are still indebted to powerful and enduring philosophical and cultural motifs such as literalness and metaphoricity, proximity and distance, identity and difference, selfhood and otherness. By exploring the historical and conceptual continuities of such traditional pairings, by inquiring into their conditions of signification and historicity, and by bringing attention to their inherent antinomies and aporetic delimitations, the book challenges the habitual notions of home, hospitality and travel and raises the question of an ethics of encounter.

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Elina Staikou completed her PhD thesis at the University of Warwick in 2003. She is currently a teaching associate at the department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches the history of ideas. She has published articles on Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

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