Architecture and Modern Literature

by David Spurr

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 28, 2012

About the author

David Spurr writes on modern English and French literature, with a particular interest in the relations between literature and the cultural and philosophical contexts of modernity. He is a Fellow of the English Association of the United Kingdom and a member of the governing boards of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation and the Société de Lecture de Genève.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Architecture and Modern Literature. David Spurr
Reviewed by Sarah Edwards

David Spurr’s new monograph, which argues for the centrality of “literature’s encounter with
the built environment” in the emergence of modernity (ix), is a wide-ranging and intellectually
ambitious contribution to an emerging field of scholarship. His rather brief definition of the
widely—and variously—used term “modernity” has obvious consequences for his approach and
object of study, and it is predicated on the notion that the early nineteenth century witnessed
urban industrial change on a hitherto unprecedented scale, which “[threw] into disarray whatever
harmony may have existed among the arts” (3). He goes on to argue that these conditions
produced a crisis of meaning for literature and architecture, leading to two very different
expressions of modernist aesthetics. In his introduction, Spurr outlines an impressive grasp
of architectural theory and traces the analogies between literary and architectural form in the
European philosophical tradition; he examines the evolution of the concepts of “dwelling” and
“home” from their “foundational myths” of Babel and the Odyssey (6), and he outlines the key
concepts that structure his subsequent readings: namely, ruins, the fragment, interiors, the
body, materials, and forms. While these themes are not new, Spurr’s detailed analysis of the
interaction between literary and architectural works in the production of their meaning leads
to some innovative readings.

The subsequent chapters are case studies of key texts and historical moments. ”An End to
Dwelling” explores the revisioning of this concept in works by Dickens, Proust, Woolf, and
Beckett. The analysis of Bleak House uses the work of Walter Benjamin to demonstrate how
Dickens subverts the ”bourgeois Victorian aesthetic that he appears to celebrate” (57), and it is an
excellent example of how architectural theory can invigorate critical readings of home and space
in Victorian fiction. The argument that Endgame embodies both the nihilism and resistance to
nihilism of some modern architects is convincing for its attention to Beckett’s use of theatrical
space in addition to its attention to the text. The reading of Mrs. Dalloway, however, adds little
to the current body of work on thresholds, gender, and the city in Woolf’s writings. In general,
there is a striking lack of reference to the recent scholarship on literature and architecture, a
point to which I will return.

The chapters “Demonic Spaces” and “Allegories of the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century”
both focus more explicitly on the question of memory. The first of these chapters explores
the “demonic unconscious” that underlies “enlightened” modernity in works by Sade, Dickens,
and Kafka. Much of the discussion here, which focuses on the ethical function of architecture
and the ways in which this function is violated in these texts, could usefully inform readings of
gothic fiction. The specific focus on the church tower in The Castle—“firm in its architectural
and spiritual definition[,] . . . [it] gives meaning to the everyday muddle of life’ (91)— masterfully
invokes a peripheral symbol, subjects it to intense architectural scrutiny, and in so doing finds
new meanings in literary language. The subsequent chapter examines the responses of Goethe,
Wordsworth, and Ruskin (as well as, briefly, James, Pater, and Adams) to the gothic cathedral,
analysing how their attribution of meaning to the gothic reveals their proposed solutions to
modern crises of meaning. It might have been useful, though, to consider more deeply how the
conventions of literary genre—the essay, travel writing, poetry—were modifying these writers’
responses, which seem to be read as “authentic.”

The following chapter, “Ruin and Restoration,” probes the modern function of gothic architecture
more deeply by comparing Ruskin’s “nostalgic,” Christian response with Viollet-le-
Duc’s “practice of restoring buildings from a priori principles rather than historical evidence” and thereby making the cathedral into a secular and aesthetic object (150). Spurr proposes that “the
opposition between an aesthetics of architectural ruin and restoration” can be compared to the
nineteenth-century opposition between allegory and symbol (143), invoking the work of Walter
Benjamin and Paul de Man and the literary and architectural symbol of the fragment. Hence,
“[Ruskin’s] restoration belongs to the form of nostalgia that dreams of the timeless unity of the
object with its timeless origins—the unity of the symbol,” whereas allegory acknowledges the
rupture with the material past (146). This analogy is convincing: however, the concept of nostalgia
is frequently evoked in this chapter (and occasionally elsewhere), and some attempts at
theorization (for example, in dialogue with Svetlana Boym’s 2001 work, The Future of Nostalgia)
would have strengthened the links made here between memory, representation, and the built
environment.

The chapters “Proust’s Interior Venice” and “Monumental Displacement in Ulysses” revisit
authors whose literary depictions of the city and urban memory have been well studied. Much
of the work on Proust focuses usefully on the deployment of architectural forms to realize his
concepts of voluntary and involuntary memory. Spurr also discusses the “architecture of desire”
in relation to both the passing girls on the street and the maternal images present in sacred architecture.

Here his nuanced analysis of the subjective experience of particular urban spaces would
have been strengthened by reference to work on the gaze (a concept to which he refers) and the
gendering of the city. The chapter on Ulysses, however, contains some excellent analyses of the
city as seen from below. Spurr discusses the presence in Joyce’s modern Dublin of “the archaic,
subject to parody and re-appropriation, but nonetheless materially present,” reflected through
the representation and varying perceptions of the changing functions of Nelson’s pillar and the
General Post Office (189). Spurr also suggests that the presence of “vagabond architecture” such
as shelters anticipates a radical shift in the concept of dwelling (202).

This theme is expanded in the final chapters. The section on Frost and Stevens explores
the connections between poetry and architecture as “primordial forms of making” (205), and
it analyzes how these poets’ uncanny, haunted houses seek to redefine dwelling in the modern
world. The final chapter considers the representation of “junkspace” (or Auge’s non-lieux) in the
high-rise blocks and shopping malls of Ballard’s and Houellebecq’s fictions; this section contains
astute analyses of the connections between architecture, the body, and violence, as well as the
observation that “the lack of connection between oneself and the constructed environment” is
an inherently modern, occasionally nostalgic, but often exhilarating experience (247).

As Spurr is a literary scholar, it is perhaps unsurprising that his book focuses largely on “the
representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature” rather than on
how the built environment has been shaped by literary texts. The work could have benefited
from engagement with recent scholarship on poetry and architecture (e.g. Lee Morrissey‘s 1999
From the Temple to the Castle) and from work on gender, interiors, and alternative definitions of
modernity and modernism (Victoria Rosner’s 2005 Modernism and the Architecture of Private
Life; Charles Rice’s 2006 The Emergence of the Interior). However, Spurr’s book is undoubtedly
a major contribution to its field, particularly in its breadth of scholarship, finely detailed close
readings, and theoretical sophistication.