Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction

Acknowledgments

This book is a map of many intersecting corridors. One of my favorites was reached via the north entrance of a large brick building in Los Angeles: on either side of this door, two pairs of windows form the eyes of an appropriately strange face. During the time I was regularly entering the building, the windows belonged to the three people to whom I am the most grateful for the guidance, criticism, and inspiration they provided this project in its earliest stages. Mark McGurl modeled the very best kind of Americanist scholarship, demanded historicity, and showed me a better way to think about modernism. Kate Hayles exempli fied the clear articulation of complex thought, took my most abstract abstractions seriously, and consistently illuminated and helped me realize the book’s greater vision. And there is simply no way to separate the ideas in this book from the many hours I spent discussing them with Mark Seltzer, for whom my gratitude, not only for his belief in the project but also for his uncanny ability to make everything more interesting, is ongoing. Also in Los Angeles, Ed Soja provided my work with a deeper sense of spatial theory. Sianne Ngai, Ken Reinhard, Chris Mott, Helen Deutsch, Kirstie McClure, Felicity Nussbaum, Jonathan Grossman, Michael North, and Richard Yarborough taught me the value of rigorous thinking combined with formidable generosity. I was a privileged resident of cohortopia with Melanie Ho, John Alba Cutler, Julian Knox, Tom O’Donnell, and Dennis Tyler, to name a few, and the beneficiary of many sunlit afternoons sharing thoughts and work with James Landau , Glenn Brewer, and James Pulizzi. I have many audiences to thank for thoughtful responses to speci fic chapters of this book. The Los Angeles Americanist Research ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv Colloquium run by Chris Looby not only formed my identity as an Americanist, but also provided important commentary on an early chapter. At the Midwestern Americanist colloquium at Indiana University , Jen Fleissner and Scott Herring raised points helpful for the manuscript revision. Vera Bühlmann, Ludger Hovestadt, and Klaus Wasserman, and their architecture students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich helped me to adopt a different point of view. I completed revisions of the manuscript after inhabiting a version if this book’s dream world: an international conference of architecture, literature, and media theorists in Weimar to discuss the corridors, service architectures, and secret passages of modernity, and I thank both the participants and my co-organizers, Markus Krajewski and Stephan Trüby. Others provided help along the way. Bernhard Siegert spent a winter in southern California and graciously accepted me into a small media theory seminar while I was writing, thus opening up the range of medial objects I found myself able to consider. Aaron Gorelik reminded me of Enoch Robinson’s rooms, and Tom March showed them to me in the first place. With Sam See, I developed confidence in corridoricity. The Getty Research Institute provided me with a bright desk looking out over travertine and bougainvillea for two years, and many of these pages were composed against that view. Maud Ellmann and John Wilkinson welcomed me to South Bend as though we were old friends, and remain my Midwestern home for talking about art and ideas. At Notre Dame I’ve had the benefit of the wonderful mentorship of Sandra Gustafson, Steve Fredman, and Laura Walls, and the support of two outstanding chairs, John Sitter and Valerie Sayers. My colleagues in the English department, such as Joe Buttigieg, José Limón, Romana Huk, Barbara Green, Susan Harris, Peter Holland, Sara Maurer, David Thomas, Suzannah Monta, Chris Vanden Bossche, Katherine Zieman, Elliott Visconsi, and Steve Tomasula , as well as Yasmin Solomonescu, Matt Wilkens, Jesse Costantino, and Kinohi Nishikawa, have made this university an exciting environment in which to work and think, as have my students. I was fortunate to find on my arrival a few friends with whom I could not only navigate the profession, but who soon ended up sustaining me through the most challenging times—I could not imagine better people to work and live with than Jason Ruiz, Aaron Carico, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, Tobias Boes, and Tracy Bergstrom. xvi acknowledgments My first in-person meeting with Doug Armato took place, appropriately enough, in a long institutional corridor. Both Doug and Danielle Kasprzak at the University of Minnesota Press have been...