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  • Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction by Kate Marshall
  • Jesse Miller (bio)
Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 256 pp. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

A corridor, attests Kate Marshall in her intellectually capacious and compulsively reflexive work Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction, is not just a passive architectural feature. If you take a peek back beyond the long lonely passageways into the word’s etymology, you find the courier, crosser of boundaries, carrier of money and messages. If in modernity the corridor’s embodied origin has fallen out of linguistic memory, noting this valence of the term is helpful for recognizing the active functioning of the hallway as an architectural technology that both connects and separates rooms, reproducing distinctions between private and public spaces within the domestic sphere, directing the flow of individuals. Drawing on German media-theorist Friedrich Kittler’s expansive definition of communication as the transmission of goods, people, and messages, Marshall suggests that the corridor is an example, and a paradigmatic one at that, of the many forms of communications media that come to dominate the modern urban-industrial landscape, including the modern novel. In fact, she suggests that the notions of individuality and interiority represented in, and perhaps even produced by, the novel are also embedded in the structure of the corridor, which emerged as a defining feature of late-eighteenth-century architecture. Just as the corridor restructured domestic relations by generating private spaces and regulating “the communication of and between bodies,” the novel “formally enacts the corridor,” encoding and transmitting private thoughts within a reading public (p. 25). Although Marshall is engaged in demonstrating the parallels between the communication processes enacted by architecture, infrastructure, and what is more commonly known as “the media” (namely, novels, newspapers, radio), she is most interested in moments when these systems intersect with or irritate one another. The [End Page 371] book’s most significant thesis is that when corridor and corridor-like structures show up in modern novels, they serve not just as a material backdrop, a location among many for characters to play out their dramas, but as flashpoints where novels observe their own mediality. Ultimately, Corridor is a demonstration of how, as “self-conscious forms that both communicate and reflexively produce interiority and sociality,” the late naturalist American novels under discussion “indicate their own narrative structures when they query the relays of the hallway” (p. 24).

At the center of each of the book’s chapters is Marshall’s concept of corridoricity, or what she self-glosses as “likeness.” This term denotes the ways in which media architectures constantly erode boundaries of difference, troubling distinctions between, for example, private and public space, individuality and sociality, and the concrete and the metaphorical registers of language. Each of Corridor’s chapters engages with a different aspect of corridoricity as it plays out in late naturalist American fiction and material culture: Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy provides an opportunity to sketch the process of “versioning” operant in the novel’s collar-stamping factory, its cinematic remakes, and modern subjectivity; a discussion of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider opens onto an explanation of the ways that the 1918 flu epidemic made visible the materially connective character of communications technology and the heteronomous quality of personhood; and a reading of C. P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power is placed in relation to his more popular “Two Cultures” lecture with the assertion that “any continuation of the discussion Snow began about the modes of communication between the disciplines demands a consideration of architectures of that communication in all of their literal and metaphorical complexities” (p. 152). In each of these cases, the corridor appears as metaphor, as concept, as material, as media.

By attending to the places in texts where novels and modern infrastructure refer to and support one another and reading them as moments where the distinction between medium and message breaks down, Marshall provides an intriguing account of how media studies might engage with the material and fictional aspects of novels without sacrificing the specificity that both projects demand. The fruitfulness of this...

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