Bursting Worlds Asunder reads artistic modernism as an aesthetic encounter with cultural and political histories embedded in architectural experience. Amy A. Foley presents doorways in modernist fiction and film as emergent sites that weld the private and the political in a confrontation between body and world. Foley not only demonstrates how early twentieth-century fiction conceives modern architecture as an active, embodied co-constructive process of building space with the senses—she also reinterprets literary modernism itself as a historizing experience with architecture, in which distinct figurations of the body in relation to doorways underscore an individual's ability to reconstruct space and materiality through perception.
Foley examines envelopment, transcendence, revelation, ecstasy, joy, rhythm, indifference, and dispersion in scenes of doorways drawn from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Richard Wright's Native Son, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Franz Kafka's Amerika, and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In these novels, the magnification of the threshold as a site of sensed political experience illuminates latent cultural and historical power dynamics of the early twentieth century. Later chapters draw on film to study the connection between genre, modes of style, and material experience, exemplified in readings of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and David Lynch's Inland Empire.
Written from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes architectural theory, material studies, and phenomenology, Bursting Worlds Asunder reinterprets liminal sites as spaces of political encounter and confrontation, wherein the body becomes a means of building space and asserting the self.
