Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr (review)

David Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature is in many ways monumental. It opens with a statement of its aims and parameters as an exploration of “a series of instances in which architecture and modern literature come together in ways that appear to break down the barriers between the two art forms, or at least to construct bridges between them,” while investigating “the manner in which the relations between architecture and literature are symptomatic of modernity as a crisis of meaning” (3, 6). The project thus appears both conceptually broad and well defined while it achieves two specific intellectual feats.

On the one hand, the study constructs bridges not merely between architecture and literature but rather more widely, if largely implicitly, across literature, architecture, urban studies, cultural geography, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and modernist studies. Perhaps the author could have further clarified the different directions of this complex interdisciplinarity and made it a more explicit component of his work. Nevertheless, it could be argued that formulating these disciplinary intersections more elaborately would have made Spurr’s study too theoretically dense and less pleasurable to read than it is. Moreover, Architecture and Modern Literature displays not only a fascinating understanding of cultural forms and fields (ranging from Babel and The Odyssey to “junkspace” and “non-lieu” and passing through The Inferno and The Arcades Project¹) but also an ability to weave together architectural theory, philosophical principles, psychoanalytical insights, seminal spatial/geographical thought, and close readings of literary works (novels, poetry, and some drama).

On the other hand, this study ambitiously traces the vast cultural time-space of modernity and modern literature across two centuries, while projecting its own view of modern literature and architecture’s particular horizons and transformations. Seeking to explore an originary moment for modernity, Spurr argues that

[a]mong the effects of an emerging modernity in this period [late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] are a variety of manifestations that call both literary and architectural meanings into question. These include the aesthetic of the fragment, the value placed on subjective interiority, the significance given to the human body, the development of new materials and techniques, and a conception of the past in terms of stock or reserve.

(28)

It is hard to agree or disagree with the specific periodization of the modern in literature and architecture proposed here because of the complex aesthetic and historical questions at stake. More interestingly, the parameters of intersecting transformations and concerns, as outlined in the “variety of manifestations” above, are very well substantiated in the book’s eight chapters.

Referencing Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Le Corbusier among others, the first chapter shows that literature’s approaches to “dwelling” have gone through several stages: “nostalgia” in the nineteenth century gave way to a “narrative and rhetorical” release from that phase as “a new consciousness of urban space” emerges “finally to a renewed confrontation with the absence of dwelling, where modern writing strives to relieve the misery of homelessness by giving thought to it” (54, 54-55). This argument is developed through readings of Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. The comparisons among the modernists here are presented succinctly: “If architecture figures in Proust as a metaphor of inner desire, it figures in Joyce as the concrete embodiment of modernity itself. Ulysses is a work that gets its characters out of the house and into the street, where they are confronted not with dwelling in its domestic sense but with their existence in urban space, the very scene of modernity” (63). In this context, Spurr wisely advises us not to confuse literary modernism, by Joyce and Woolf especially, with the “utopian manifestos of modern architecture in particular” (66). These themes are linked in many ways to the seventh chapter in which Spurr presents a primarily Heideggerian reading of building, dwelling, ruins, and the void in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: prominent cultural-geographical topics that Spurr revisits with...