Novel Architectures Rachel Greenwald Smith (bio) Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. xvii + 233 pp. $75.00; $25.00 paper. Kate Marshall’s excellent monograph, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction, examines the presence of hallways, conduits, passageways, and other connective structures in works of twentieth-century American fiction. Marshall undertakes a careful historical parsing of the relationship between architecture, media studies, and literary form. In the process, she models a powerful alternative to prevailing approaches to interdisciplinary work in literary studies. Neither subordinating literature to other fields nor giving these fields short shrift, Marshall deftly demonstrates how works of literature can be understood to actively engage with extraliterary domains. Her book could easily be categorized under the subheading “literature and architecture” or “literature and media,” but it should more properly be described as taking on the study of literature as architecture and literature as media. Marshall’s project is particularly relevant in our current moment, which has seen enormous growth in interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities. This growth has occurred for reasons of both genuine intellectual curiosity and institutional opportunism, but within literary studies in particular, the rise of interdisciplinary approaches seems to have occurred in the face of the waning of poststructuralism and deconstruction. That literary scholars would [End Page 593] be looking for a way to engage with nonliterary concerns now, after the linguistic turn has faded, should be no surprise. The end of the linguistic turn also means that scholars of literature have lost the place of unprecedented centrality they had when they could fashion themselves as experts in linguistic representation as such, and by extension envision the study of literature as accessing the shaping force of everything from individual experience to social formations. If, as Bruno Latour has put it, poststructuralist critique has “run out of steam,” and there is a turn toward understanding the world as it is composed of discourse and material structures, language and earth, bodies and minerals, and human and nonhuman actors, those of us in the profession of literary criticism have some decisions to make.1 Our age would seem to require either a humbling return to an inward account of the explicitly literary or a reach outward beyond the literary domain in order to make connections between literature and nonlinguistic, nonliterary materials. The apparent choice is between reading literary works as merely aesthetic interventions in the formal evolution of the literary and reading literary works as representing, and therefore offering comment upon, the nonliterary world. This second option has provided the impetus to a range of interdisciplinary subfields within literary studies that often take the form of “literature-and-blank,” including literature and science, literature and religion, literature and medicine, and literature and the environment, as well as the silent “literature-and” field to which the majority of today’s literary scholars implicitly subscribe: literature and history. There is a third option, however, one that is rarely seen in literary criticism because of the ambition, boldness, and true interdisciplinary heft needed to accomplish it. It is possible to see works of literature as not only reflecting but also participating in nonliterary domains, as not only representing extraliterary concerns but also acting directly in relation to those concerns through their particularly literary quality, that is, their form. It is this option that Kate Marshall dares to take in Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction. [End Page 594] Marshall’s chapters take up corridors, hallways, and other conduits in figures ranging from the concrete to the abstract: from the highways of John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, the sewers of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, and the furnaces in Richard Wright’s Native Son to the media technology of stamping in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, vectors of contagion in Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and the transfer of power in the work of C. P. Snow and Carl Schmitt. It would be easy enough to read these structures metaphorically—as Marshall frequently points out, there is ample psychoanalytic material to be mined in literature’s corridors—but the study moves beyond the notions of corridor...