Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction - Softcover

Marshall, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816679282 ISBN 13: 9780816679287

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013

Synopsis

Corridor offers a series of conceptually provocative readings that illuminate a hidden and surprising relationship between architectural space and modern American fiction. By paying close attention to fictional descriptions of some of modernity’s least remarkable structures, such as plumbing, ductwork, and airshafts, Kate Marshall discovers a rich network of connections between corridors and novels, one that also sheds new light on the nature of modern media.

The corridor is the dominant organizational structure in modern architecture, yet its various functions are taken for granted, and it tends to disappear from view. But, as Marshall shows, even the most banal structures become strangely visible in the noisy communication systems of American fiction. By examining the link between modernist novels and corridors, Marshall demonstrates the ways architectural elements act as media. In a fresh look at the late naturalist fiction of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, she leads the reader through the fetus-clogged sewers of Manhattan Transfer to the corpse-choked furnaces of Native Son and reveals how these invisible spaces have a fascinating history in organizing the structure of modern persons.

Portraying media as not only objects but processes, Marshall develops a new idiom for Americanist literary criticism, one that explains how media studies can inform our understanding of modernist literature.

About this title

From the Author:

Kate Marshall is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0816679282
• ISBN 13: 9780816679287
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256