CALL FOR PAPERS

Congrès de la SAES. Université de Bordeaux – 2 au 4 juin 2027

« Architecture »

Atelier 5 : 

Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) / La Nouvelle de langue anglaise

Architecture is never simply a matter of buildings. From the etymology of the word, derived from the Greek arkhitektōn(master builder), architecture evokes the practices of designing, ordering and constructing the spaces in which individuals and communities live, and interrogates relationships between space, power, identity and belonging. The successive historical transformations of built environments (from the industrial city to modernist housing estates, postwar reconstruction, postmodern urban landscapes and contemporary architectural responses to globalisation and the ecological crisis) have inspired writers, artists and filmmakers to explore the ways in which buildings embody social divisions, preserve collective memories, and open up possibilities for alternative forms of life. The theme of architecture also invites us to examine how literature and the visual arts reflect upon their own practices of composition and structuring.

The history of the Gothic novel offers a revealing point of departure for thinking about literary architecture as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) the building is already inseparable from the structure of the narrative. Walpole’s famous declaration in the preface to the second edition that he wished “to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern” is itself a statement about literary construction: the modern novel’s psychological and social realism is to be housed within the architecture of the medieval romance. The result is a form in which spatial structure and narrative structure mirror one another. This relationship can be placed within a broader theoretical framework through Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, whose phenomenology of dwelling makes the house both a physical structure and a structure of consciousness. “For our house is our corner of the world,” Bachelard writes; “it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (4). The literary house has a double existence as a place inhabited by characters but also as a repository of memory. It is a structure through which the past can be stored and, more importantly, reconstructed.

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) inherits the Gothic conception of the house while making the architecture of Manderley inseparable from that of the novel itself. The famous opening, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” places the house before almost everything else. Manderley is already lost when the narrative begins, and the entire novel becomes, in a sense, an attempt to reconstruct it through recollection. The building consequently becomes the more stable “character” in the story. Likewise in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), Brandham Hall is the architectural form through which the adult narrator reconstructs a past that he can no longer inhabit. The novel’s very narrative situation—an elderly Leo discovering the diary of his twelve-year-old self—turns the movement through the house and its grounds into a movement through layers of memory. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), the aristocratic mansion becomes both a repository of memory and a space in which the decline of an established social order is played out. Darlington Hall, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), is presented as the organising principle of the butler’s world as events apparently occurring outside the house are, from his perspective, generated from its centre. Yet Ishiguro constructs the novel so that this apparently stable architecture gradually breaks down—as does Manderley in du Maurier’s novel—and, in the end, it is progressively reconstructed through fragments.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) presents another form of textual (re)construction and the author revealed that the Tallis house was deliberately conceived as “an uglier place—a late-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic monstrosity, with imitation battlements” (338-39). The house is therefore a pastiche whose architecture anticipates the novel’s larger concern with imitation and the desire to impose coherence upon experience. Questioning the possibility of coherence, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) also uses the metaphor of architecture that he turns inward, making it materially visible. The four books do not follow a chronological sequence and the fictional author explains the principle directly: “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another” (483), while the displaced epilogue is declared “too important” to be featured at the end. The book is therefore presented as an architectural structure whose entrances and exits have deliberately been rearranged.

In twentieth and twenty-first century literature, urban landscapes are often depicted as powerful expressions of social organisation. The distribution of residential space, the distinction between public and private areas, and the boundaries separating neighbourhoods all contribute to the reproduction of class relations and social inequalities. London’s contrasting districts, from the affluent West End to historically working-class areas of the East End, offer a particularly revealing setting for examining how urban space is divided, experienced and contested. In Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), the geography of north-west London intersects with questions of class, race, mobility and social aspiration. Jonathan Coe’s Number Eleven (2015) satirically explores contemporary British society and its inequalities, while John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) uses a London street and its inhabitants to map the interconnections between wealth, precarity and social change.

The architecture of segregation may also take the form of walls, barriers and borders. In Northern Ireland, peace walls and security gates have given physical expression to political and religious divisions, while shaping everyday movements, encounters and perceptions of community. Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle (1989), Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), Glenn Patterson’s fiction or the poetry of Ciaran Carson feature among works that interrogate the relationship between architecture, violence and memory. Architecture is a well-known tool for regulating, disciplining and controlling social life. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and Michel Foucault’s subsequent analysis of panopticism in Discipline and Punish(1975) offer influential frameworks for examining the relationship between spatial organisation, visibility and power. Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012), for instance, proposes a compelling exploration of such surveillance. In the context of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, the relationship between architecture and the natural world also demands renewed attention. Buildings and cities are not separate from their environments: they depend on material resources, energy systems and ecological networks, while transforming landscapes and affecting human and non-human life.

In the case of the short story, Edgar Allan Poe’s essays on composition offer one of the nineteenth century’s most explicit accounts of the short story as an architectural form. From his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), and related critical writings, Poe repeatedly conceives narrative as a structure whose parts must be subordinated to a governing principle. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” he insists that “every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen,” since only with the ending “constantly in view” can the writer make “the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention” (13). The architecture of the tale thus depends upon anticipation and proportion. Knowing from the beginning the direction a tale will take helps create a “unity of effect.” The question of length is also central in his approach to writing; as he explains: “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression,” because “every thing like totality is at once destroyed” (15). Gérard Genette’s notion of the architext takes this author-centered model further by reminding us that no individual work designs itself outside generic history. In The Architext, Genette defines architextuality as “the relationship between the text and its architext,” the architext being constituted by “the genres, with their determinations” and by the various kinds of discourse to which a text belongs (83, 82). Poe’s prescriptions can consequently be understood not simply as instructions for constructing an individual tale but as an early attempt to articulate the formal logic of the short story as genre.

The architecture becomes distinctly different, however, when the short story ceases to be the ultimate unit of composition and several stories are organized into a larger structure. Forrest L. Ingram’s pioneering study Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century defines the cycle as “a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” (19). The architectural principle here is no longer Poe’s single, indivisible effect but a reciprocity between parts and whole—we may think of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) or consider Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’s Party (1973, posthumous). Susan Garland Mann identifies the essential characteristic of the form as the fact that “the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated” and argues that they “work together, creating something that could not be achieved in a single story” (15). Joyce Carol Oates’s “novels in stories” provide a fine illustration of this idea and echo Shirley Ann Grau’s contention that “a short story cycle has the best of both forms. It’s got the power of the novel because of its length, and it’s got the delicacy and the poetry, if you will, the insight and the precision, of the short story. If you can blend those together, it’s a much more interesting form than either the single short story or the novel” (106).

Robert Luscher’s concept of the short story sequence moves the emphasis still further from a finished architectural totality to an architecture progressively constructed in reading. A sequence is, for Luscher, “a volume of stories, collected and organized by their author, in which the reader successively realizes underlying patterns of coherence by continual modifications of his perceptions of pattern and theme” (148); consequently, “the volume as a whole becomes an open book, inviting the reader to construct a network of associations that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact” (149). Where Poe imagines composition as the deliberate construction of a bounded structure whose parts tend towards a pre-established effect, theorists of the short story cycle or sequence describe an architecture based upon co-texts (as exemplified by J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories) and upon the reader’s retrospective and prospective activity for the meaning of one story is continually revised by its relation to the others. In this sense, the short story cycle might be regarded as an architextual development of the short story’s architectural logic. It preserves the autonomy and formal concentration of individual tales that might have appeared previously while relocating the question of composition from the design of a single effect to the organisation of a larger field of relations.

In theatre, cinema and the visual arts, architecture also plays a pivotal role. By organising space in a particular way, a director creates a unique space that will structure their work and generate a specific atmosphere. Architecture in the visual arts likewise offers a fertile starting point for analysing the relationships between forms, uses of space, and collective representations, allowing one to examine architecture as a narrative or visual device.

This workshop organised jointly by the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) and the Journal of the Short Story in English welcomes proposals that consider architecture both as a material and historical reality and as an aesthetic, political, psychological or philosophical construct. How do literary texts and works of art represent, appropriate or transform the built environment? How do architectural forms shape narrative, perception and artistic practice? And how might literature and the visual arts challenge dominant ways of organising, inhabiting and imagining space? Papers may take as their focus British literature and visual arts of the 20th and the 21st centuries. Contributors may also turn to the genre of the short story in English from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

Proposals for papers in English (300 words + short bibliography) and a brief biographical note should be sent jointly to Vanessa Guignery (vanessa.guignery@ens-lyon.fr) and Gérald Preher (gerald.preher@univ-artois.fr) before November 30th, 2026. Papers will be submitted for publication to the peer-reviewed journals Études britanniques contemporaines or The Journal of the Short Story in English.

Selective bibliography

Anderson, Christy, ed. The Built Surface: v.1: Architecture and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Present. London and New York: Routledge. 2002.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. 1964. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. 2007. First edition 2002.

Cairns, Graham. The Architecture of the Screen. Intellect. 2013.

Genette, Gérard. The Architext: An Introduction. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Grau, Shirley Ann. “Interview with Shirley Ann Grau.” By Noel Harold Kaylor Jr. Short Story 8.1 (2000): 101-09.

Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Kennedy, J. Gerald, ed. Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Toward a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle.” Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (1988): 9-25.

Luscher, Robert M. “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Jo Ellyn Clarey and Susan Lohafer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 148-67.

McEwan, Ian. “Atonement: A Conversation with Ian McEwan.” Études anglaises 71.3 (2018): 332-40.

Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001.

Pallasmaa, J. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2011.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poe: Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. R Thompson. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

Spurr, David. Architecture and Modern Literature. University of Michigan, 2012.

Tobe, Renée. Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. MIT Press, 1992.