Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Notes

Preface 1. Gerber, Roth, and Silver, “All That I Need Is a Hallway.” 2. Ibid. 3. I take the phrase “materialities of communication” from a collection of essays by the same title that moves between two poles of this book’s theoretical background, namely the discourse analysis of Friedrich Kittler and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication. 4. Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 20. 5. Jarzombek, “Corridor Spaces,” 728–70. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3–4. Introduction 1. See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. 2. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 125. 3. Benjamin quotes the Illustrated Guide to Paris on “inner boulevards”: “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marblepaneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature” (ibid., 31). 4. J. Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form. 5. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 7. 6. Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, 52. 7. Kelly, “Telling Questions in Absalom, Absalom!,” 123. 8. Hönnighausen, Faulkner, 63. 9. Chandler, Dwelling in the Text, 271–72. Chandler’s divisions make literal those described by Eric Sundquist in Faulkner. 10. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 124. 183 NOTES 11. Ibid., 67. 12. Ibid., 109. The specific association of “sentience” with the house could also be seen to dehumanize Clytie and other characters subject to its empty echoes, such as Quentin himself, and Rosa’s sister Ellen, referred to in these passages as an “empty shell.” 13. Brooks, “Incredulous Narration,” 264. 14. Ibid., 266. 15. There are many discussions of the loom as an important piece of medial and literary history. See, for example, Alan Liu’s discussion of the loom as digital (“Imagining the New Media Encounter”), or Liedeke Plate’s location of digital textuality in the figure of Penelope’s loom (“Is Contemporary Women’s Writing Computational?”). 16. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 80. 17. Thus, I share in this study the interest Jennifer Fleissner declares in Women, Compulsion, Modernity in looking beyond Americanist criticism either overtly or implicitly committed to what she refers to as “hyperbolic accounts of modernity’s meanings for the American individual” (7) as well as the sense that emerges in the conclusion of her book that the more dynamic, obsessive naturalism she describes has a long and undertheorized life in the twentieth century. I also respond in part to Bill Brown’s suggestion that the “material unconscious” he locates in Stephen Crane and modernized recreational space continues to develop, so that in “private modernist techniques” one sees how the space he examines “spatializes modern mental life—allowing the subject to inhabit a materialized interiority” (Brown, The Material Unconscious, 26). Taken together, these texts show broadly that the scholarship focused on the turn of the twentieth century is too rich a resource for thinking about the persistence of materiality and the strangeness of form not to feature prominently in a more capacious account of novelistic interiority as it travels into late modernity. 18. See Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”; and Goble, Beautiful Circuits. 19. Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” 74. 20. Ibid., 75. Evans presents his findings as a glimpse of the history of the corridor rather than its full view. He claims that the first corridor in domestic architecture was designed in 1597 by John Thorpe in England, but that the form remained dormant until the late eighteenth century, when it became a requirement for all domestic interiors. 21. Ibid., 70. 22. Jarzombek, “Corridor Spaces,” 766. 23. Ibid., 738, 752, 764–66. 24. Muthesius, The English House, 79. 25. Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934, 200. 26. Ibid., 202. 27. Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream, 7. 28. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia, 112. 184 notes to introduction 29. Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” 79. 30. Ibid., 88. 31. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia, xvi. 32. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 7–8. 33. Kittler, “The History of Communication Media,” 1. 34. In his chapter on communication in Social Systems, Luhmann writes: “Processes that can be applied to themselves are reflexive. With communication, this means that one can communicate about communication. One can thematize the communicative process in communication, can inquire about and explain how something was...