Corridor

Corridor

Media Architectures in American Fiction

Kate Marshall

How neglected architectural spaces act as media in modern American novels

256 Pages

  • eBook
  • 9780816684359
  • Published: June 1, 2013
BUY
  • Paperback
  • 9780816679287
  • Published: June 14, 2013
BUY

Details

Corridor

Media Architectures in American Fiction

Kate Marshall

ISBN: 9780816684359

Publication date: June 1st, 2013

256 Pages

0 x 0


Corridor offers a series of conceptually provocative readings that illuminate a hidden and surprising relationship between architectural space and modern American fiction. By paying close attention to fictional descriptions of some of modernity’s least remarkable structures, such as plumbing, ductwork, and airshafts, Kate Marshall discovers a rich network of connections between corridors and novels, one that also sheds new light on the nature of modern media.


The corridor is the dominant organizational structure in modern architecture, yet its various functions are taken for granted, and it tends to disappear from view. But, as Marshall shows, even the most banal structures become strangely visible in the noisy communication systems of American fiction. By examining the link between modernist novels and corridors, Marshall demonstrates the ways architectural elements act as media. In a fresh look at the late naturalist fiction of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she leads the reader through the fetus-clogged sewers of Manhattan Transfer to the corpse-choked furnaces of Native Son and reveals how these invisible spaces have a fascinating history in organizing the structure of modern persons.


Portraying media as not only objects but processes, Marshall develops a new idiom for Americanist literary criticism, one that explains how media studies can inform our understanding of modernist literature.



Kate Marshall is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.


Contents


Preface: “All That I Need Is a Hallway”

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Corridoricity


1. Becoming Media in An American Tragedy

2. Infrastructural Modernity

3. The Flu and the Media, or Contagion 1918

4. Corridors of Power

Epilogue: Open Plan


Notes

Bibliography

Index