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Reviewed by:
  • Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger
  • Daniel Purdy (bio)
Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 216 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95.

Susan Bernstein's Housing Problems: Writing and Building in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger examines how architectural terminology organizes literary and philosophical texts. She presents striking new scholarship, moving clearly beyond the first forays to unearth the architecture of metaphysical thought. This is an important work that will be read by architects, literary critics, and philosophers alike. The author's theoretical alliances are clear from the first page. She cites Mark Wigley's important Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), but she has a much more nuanced deconstructive manner. When required, the book provides clear, useful summaries of major theoretical terms; however, it is mainly interested in exposing instability and the lack of clarity when architecture is invoked to provide order in a literary narrative.

Bernstein's brilliant introduction argues that architecture is divided between ideal plans that lay out a structure of meaning and real, empirical buildings that often diverge into domestic complexity. Bernstein provides concise summaries of architectural reasoning in Descartes and Hegel as she elaborates on Derrida's key interventions into architectural debates. Her opening lays out a complex plan for the book, yet the order of this book [End Page 669] is never uncertain. The thread of the argument is never lost. Each chapter ends with a pithy theoretical conclusion that brings the reader back to the opening section. Bernstein is very careful about her theoretical terms; she is never jargony, and the simple verbs she chooses often have a rich theoretical connotation. These loaded terms are not repeated as fetishes; instead, each chapter has its own terms to describe how its texts organize and define an inside and an outside. The themes of housing, holding, containing, and walling-in run through the book but always resurface in such a manner as to seem fresh and relevant. The book is very well written; it feels well honed, as if each argument has been pondered for a long time and carefully rephrased.

The title and introduction do not reveal just how deeply Bernstein is interested in the gothic, both as a literary genre and an architectural style. These connections become clear slowly in the first chapter in which she explains the importance of architectural distinctions in Goethe's formulation of education (Bildung) as a lifelong project. She couples a compelling reading of Goethe's encounter with the Strasbourg cathedral with the climax of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Goethe's musealized house in Weimar. She shows compellingly how texts and the museum embody the tension between abstract plans and lived space. Her discussion of Goethe's essays about the gothic cathedral goes beyond the traditional commentaries because she juxtaposes Goethe's famous early essay against the revisions he made in old age.

The importance of the gothic comes to the fore in the chapter on Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, where Bernstein argues that architecture's traditional role as the physical framework that stabilizes meaning falls together, that is, literally collapses, thereby producing a distinctly gothic effect wherein signifiers produce and participate in the signified. In other words, gothic architecture shapes Walpole's narrative while lending it the telltale signs that define the genre—dark corridors, vaulted rooms, twisted, mysterious labyrinths. The novel's concern for establishing authenticity, both as a compelling tale and as a standard of moral judgment, depends upon a gothic organization of space. Having laid out the gothic novel's features, Bernstein reads Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as gothic tales that mimic Walpole's architectural language only to bring about the demise of its references, most literally with the gothic structure's collapse.

In discussing Goethe's Elective Affinities, Bernstein explains how the novel depicts the protagonists' failed attempt at constructing a coherent architectural hermeneutic. Bernstein goes further than any previous scholar in taking up Derrida's challenge not to read figures as metaphors...

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