Nicholas Hall (Fordham University)
nmha@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Homes, architecture, and urban space have become central characters of film and literature since the inception of their media. From Wuthering Heights to Sentimental Value, spatiality in film and literature has served to reveal structures of power, small and large. This special session examines how literary and cinematic representations of spatiality, architecture, and infrastructure not only reflect but also shape social power. This session seeks papers that identify, analyze, and critique the mechanisms by which spatiality, architecture, and infrastructure construct, reveal, reinforce, deconstruct, or dismantle social hierarchies.

Walter Benjamin asserts that the uncanny was “born out of the rise of great cities,” suggesting that this new kind of infrastructure gave rise to a transformed social fabric that enabled both the re-emergence of repressed power structures and the emergence of new social hierarchies (14). Benjamin’s claim revises much of the previous scholarship’s analysis of architecture and society, from the classical canon's favoring of buildings that mirror the proportions of the human body to a modernist upheaval that suggests architecture instead “objectifies various states of the body” and society (Vidler 21).

Beginning in the 19th century, the home emerged as the most critical site of literary spatial analysis, given its "apparent domesticity, residue of family history and nostalgia", with the topos of the haunted house becoming synonymous with "romanticism itself" by the end of the century (17). Texts surrounding the home: from haunted houses and home invasions to princesses locked in ivory towers, all reveal a latent social power reinforced through infrastructure and spatiality. This special session examines how literary and cinematic representations of spatiality, architecture, and infrastructure not only reflect but also shape social power. This session seeks papers that identify, analyze, and critique the mechanisms by which spatiality, architecture, and infrastructure construct, reveal, reinforce, deconstruct, or dismantle social hierarchies.

From the jarring contrast of the storm-battered facades of Wuthering Heights and the crimson-covered chairs of Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to the oppressive brutalist infrastructure of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the terrifyingly stratified structures in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or Othello’s Apollonian heavily surveilled Venice, this special session looks for papers that explore domesticity, urbanism, and spatiality in literature and film as analogous to hegemonic structures both upheld and in flux.