Bursting Worlds Asunder: Doorways in Modernist Fiction (LSU Press, spring 2027) is my forthcoming scholarly book.
This work recharacterizes literary modernism as a sensorial, spatial, and temporal relationship with doorways in fiction. I examine envelopment, hiddenness, transcendence, ecstasy, rhythm, and presence in the doorways of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Wright’s Native Son, Woolf’s Between the Acts, Kafka’s Amerika, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The final chapters extend myths about depth and interiority to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective of architectural theory, material studies, and phenomenology, this book redefines modernism as our ability to rebuild space and materials through perception.