This seminar uses the occasion of the ACLA’s convening in Houston—an “architectural treasure house,” in Stephen Fox’s words—as an opportunity to investigate intersections of literature, textuality, and the built environment. How does architecture tell stories, whether by programming social action or by indexing history? How does literature negotiate the meanings of architecture? Jennifer Bloomer’s declaration that “architecture stands and stands for” invites us to consider ways of reading buildings and landscapes as both artifacts of engineering and as narrative objects. Accordingly, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of architectural settings as “form[s] of programming [the reader]” compels us to see how literary texts employ architecture to locate the reader mentally and socially. Might both literary and architectural texts be conceptualized using Christopher Alexander’s design concept of a pattern language, through which a pattern “describes a problem which occurs...in our environment, and then describes...a solution to that problem”? Or does this idea mark a distinction, wherein architecture aims to solve social and environmental issues, while literature aims to problematize them? Most pressingly, how do literature and architecture cooperatively engage the problems of race, gender, and class? Adrienne Brown’s argument that 20th-century literature explored the urban skyline as a force “changing what it meant to both see and be seen as a racial subject” presses us to consider how literature confronts architectural social relations. 

We are seeking papers that engage the built environment as a site for narrativity, aesthetics, and symbolic and social discourses; or papers that explore literature for its enactment of the built environment as a set of symbols with social and technical meanings and formal effects. Areas of inquiry include:

• Building stories: How do specific buildings encapsulate cultural or personal experience?
• Technology and technicity: How do the methods and materialities of architecture translate to literature, or vice versa?
• Private vs. Public: How does architecture establish public and private spaces; how does literature penetrate or uphold these limits?
• Authors and architects: How do particular literary or architectural visions cross the boundaries of the two arts?
• Race and ethnicity: How do architecture and literature concretize or critique racial structures or ethnocultures?
• Gender and sexuality: How does architecture enable gender distinction or sexualization; how does literature engage these dynamics?
• Diversity of media: How can we read architecture differently across books, comics, film, art?
• Surveillance and sousveillance: How does architecture contain or liberate the political subject; how does literature explore these issues?
• Urban, rural, in-between: How does literature imagine architecture in terms of different types of places?   
• Texas: How does literature engage the built landscape of Texas; what stories does Texas architecture tell?