Architecture And The Text: The (s)crypts Of Joyce And Piranesi
(Jennifer Bloomer)
Although Architectural History and Theory is ascribed to male writers, Jennifer Bloomer made one of the most dynamic female entries in the field with her book Architecture and the text: (s)cripts of Joyce and Piranesi.
In this overwhelmingly innovative book, Bloomer concentrates on vital philosophical questions concerning the relation between writing and architecture. She creates a unique relationship between the two (one literary and one architectural) cultural envisionings from different periods: through the allegorical strategies she finds in James Joyce?s Finnegans Wake she analyzes three works of Giambattista Piranesi (Campo Marzio, Collegio, and the Carceri). In the book, the author argues that architecture is a system of representation, with signifying possibilities that go beyond the purely symbolic. In the same way, text can be perceived as an architectural structure.
The book does not follow a certain plot of linear thinking. Instead, it is an architectural piece itself: a collection of questions formulates the beginning of her book, which rapidly develops into a compound interwoven text. Jennifer Bloomer?s attitude follows the deconstructionists, Barthes and Derrida who have attacked linear hierarchy in writing and proposed that 'the end of linear writing is the end of the book'. Her research follows the new approach in Architectural studies: Written in 1993, it signifies the hypertextual way of writing and thinking in Architectural theory. Architecture may have been described as a 'line focused' discipline, but the non-linear treatises that have been introduced in post-modern and deconstructive architectural theory launch a new perspective to the profession. Although texts of this type have proved confusing to readers expecting linear texts, their subjective meaning cannot be isolated by the reader, who reproduces the text and interacts with the author. Language in ?Architecture and the text? obtains a process, a dialectic is being produced between the reader and the author, and the book has a strongly ?associational? character, which is the most distinctive feature of Bloomer?s feminine writing.
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