"This chapter provides one phenomenological interpretation of writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office cable-television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005. The chapter considers how...
more"This chapter provides one phenomenological interpretation of writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office cable-television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005. The chapter considers how home and at-homeness are portrayed in the series, drawing on two contrasting phenomenological conceptions: First, Edmund Husserl’s homeworld/alienworld as interpreted by Anthony Steinbock in Home and Beyond (Steinbock 1995); and, second, Kristen Jacobson’s being-at-home (Jacobson 2009). The argument is made that an open sense of at-homeness, grounded in family and place, allows for personal and communal transformation partly impelled by unsettling moments when characters suddenly encounter, in their home lifeworld, compelling situations and understandings before out of sight—i.e., the uncanny.
Key words: home, at-homeness, dwelling, homeworld, alienworld, being-at-home, uncanny, place, phenomenology, phenomenology of home, Alan Ball, Six Feet Under
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