| The Architectural Novel demonstrates how the domestic spaces in novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec, Don DeLillo, and Mark Z. Danielewski are mirrored by the disjunctive structures of the books that contain them. In the twentieth century, the most experimental literature anatomizes the house and the elusiveness of home through the complicated architecture of the novel, an increasingly self-destructive genre. Gaston Bachelard writes that "a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability." I explore what "illusions" of security and stability these authors protest and why. For each of the novels under examination, the disquiet over home's incapability to function as shelter is in parallel with larger social and political forces in the wake of major historical events.;The Architectural Novel bridges the metaphorical concept of home and the concrete structure of house by bringing together scholarship on architecture, space, and postmodern fiction and argues that in literary representations of domesticity, private space becomes a frontier of exploration into the future of the novel. Home for these writers is less a place than an idea; rather than a fixed bricks-and-mortar structure, it is an ongoing process of habitation---a system of interacting, dynamic parts within a house (rooms, characters, objects, actions). The Architectural Novel tracks the postmodern novel's staging of the home from World War II to the present, revealing a mutual exchange between French and American anxieties about postmodern aesthetics and national identity. Focusing on Robbe Grillet's Jealousy (1957), Perec's Life, A User's' Manual (1979), DeLillo's White Noise (1985), and Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), I show that ultimately, these highly diverse and formally complex novels tell us something deceptively simple about contemporary American life: that its literary and living spaces are really one. |
