Modernism and 'Lived' Architectures

University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2017 Doorways to Being: Modernism and 'Lived' Architectures Amy A. Foley University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Foley, Amy A., "Doorways to Being: Modernism and 'Lived' Architectures" (2017). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 584. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/584 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DOORWAYS TO BEING: MODERNISM AND 'LIVED' ARCHITECTURES BY AMY A. FOLEY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF AMY A. FOLEY APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Stephen Barber Galen Johnson Valerie Karno Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 Abstract Situated in recent scholarship on interiors and architecture in modernist fiction, "Doorways to Being" explores ways in which the modernist novel proposes a phenomenological engagement with the material environment, specifically the body in relation to transitional architectures. The study of thresholds in select modern fiction seeks to answer the essential question of how and why we move in the constructed world from the perspective of phenomenology and cultural studies. This comparative and interdisciplinary dissertation demonstrates how modernist fiction reestablishes the primacy of the sensed physical world in the spirit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The introduction theorizes the threshold or doorway as thing, object, and contributor to the ideologies of architectural systemacity. The following three chapters respectively study William Faulkner’s enveloping thresholds in Sanctuary, ecstatic thresholds in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, and elevators and the mechanized body in Franz Kafka's Amerika. The fourth and final chapter compares select works by James Joyce and Colm Tóibín, examining the impact of postmodern aesthetics on contemporary architectural narration and national identity. The conclusion extends the phenomenology of architecture in fiction to the realm of modernist cinema, illustrating concepts and techniques of phenomenological film extrapolated from the writings of Walter Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty. Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes to my advisor Stephen M. Barber and co-director Galen A. Johnson for their mentorship, intellectual rigor, ongoing discourse, patience, and remarkable friendship. Truly, they have shown what it is to direct a developing scholar. They have allowed me to explore theoretical centers of gravity and learn from the writing process itself while modelling what it means to confront the demands placed on the critic by our era and disciplines. In addition, I thank Valerie Karno, David Faflik, and Michael Honhart for their advice, readership, and constant support. I also thank Kathleen Davis, Walter von Reinhart, Vincent Colapietro, Thomas Inge, Michael Lahey, and Howard Eiland for their contributions and challenges to my thinking at various points during the composing process. My greatest personal acknowledgment is reserved for my partner and companion, James Foley, whose original organic intellect has shown me a usually more thorough, discerning, inclusive, and understanding way of being. iii For Jo-Anne Hazel Coutant iv Table of Contents Abstract...........................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………....iii Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………v Introduction "Threshold Magic": A Theoretical Inquiry…………………………………………….1 Chapter One "Beyond the Door": Faulkner's Sanctuary and Architectural Envelopment………….53 Chapter Two Ecstasis, Ecstasis: Woolf's Threshold in Between the Acts…………………………...89 Chapter Three Kafka from the Outside: Phenomenal Elevators in Amerika………………………..136 Chapter Four Rhythm and Depthlessness in Joyce and Tóibín: Modern to Contemporary Thresholds ……………………………………………….180 Conclusion "Burst This Prison-World Asunder": A Phenomenology of Modernist Film………..215 Appendix An "Austere, Whispering Power": An Interview with Colm Tóibín………………...226 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………………..244 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………251 v Introduction "Threshold Magic": A Theoretical Inquiry All of my dreams about my family occur in the only house in which I lived as a child. Our house, in my dream as well as in the past, organizes, clarifies, or simplifies the desires of my family. In my dreams, my mother is always inside and my father is outside. The structure of our home makes clear my mother's desire to read and play the piano on a summer day and my father's desire to keep his bees and build boats. The passage between those realms is one I knew well. Our back doorway is one that I frequently traversed. Only now, as part of a compulsion toward self-understanding, do I understand its significance. In my life, the threshold is the ever-open passage between two lives at odds, yet destined to be unapologetically bound to one another. The frequency of my passage in and out of the house is emblematic of the confluence of the sublime and the material, but also my devotion and entanglement with the two forces of parenthood. Our backdoor is more than an emblem. It is no metaphor. It acquires being in the memory of my body. The skin of my calves recall the temperature and gust of air felt on them while alighting the three wooden steps leading to the door. In the time-space between my last step before opening the door and my grasp of the smooth golden handle is the convergence of two lives into one. In passing through, my body welds and is welded to the lives on both sides. In one dream, I visited the childhood home of my partner, which I have never visited and have only seen in photos. In my dream, he was a boy of roughly ten years of age. I peered at him through the front screen door as he sat in front of a television 1 playing his Nintendo. He looked much like he did in photographs I had seen of him at that age, even wearing the faded red shirt from a photo. I marveled that this was possible as I watched him play. I did not dare enter the house. I remember having an acute fear of entering, as if in the process of intruding, I myself would be intruded upon. Despite my conscious insistence that this was a house of the past, it was also the house of my future and that of my partner. The passage between my state of vigilance and the germination of my present fulfillment is also a place of ecstasy, where I await my partner's transition from childhood dependency into our mutual adult companionship. The threshold in my dream is a site of sexual threat and relational prematurity. The gaping of the open door then and there would signal the death of the present moment. This is a threshold before which I chose to wait. The mythic quality of the closed but transparent door supplies the dreamer with security, yet its openness is the source of anxiety. The doorway is an everyday phenomenon, central to our architectural experiences and embedded in the fabric of our moving and being. Its effects on our minds and lives are yet unknown to us and only becoming known as we accept the enigma of living in a world of things that occupy a position of objectivity and subjectivity.i The above reflection is but the poetically understood beginning of the following meditation of this singular structure in its most prominent, affective, and effective manifestations. The following is a discussion of the doorway, referred to more broadly as the threshold, as thing and object, as phenomenon, as part of the material world, and as political-aesthetic set of relations in which the body is engaged. Some of the thinkers evoked in this introduction appear to contradict one another in 2 purpose and methodology. While I stand by my assessment that many of their philosophical differences are justified by their differing inquiries and corresponding questions, many of them are fundamentally at odds. For example, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of structures and Foucault's structures of relational practice are both essential. In his "Foreword to the English Edition" in The Order of Things, phenomenology is the one perspective that Foucault out rightly rejects for the purpose of understanding scientific discourse. He suggests that a philosophy which "gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which gives a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity" is ill-fitting to the study of epistemologies in relation to practices. Foucault qualifies his statement according to the purpose and subjects of his project: "The historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a discursive practice" (xiv). He does not discount the study of phenomenology in general; rather, he clearly states its limitations in adequately addressing the complexities of a discourse. Contrary to the impression that Foucault rejects phenomenology, it seems that Merleau-Ponty makes fewer allowances for Foucault's

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