Table of Contents
Contributors
Kathleen Cambor; Terrence Doody; Mart Doty; Laura Furman; Kelly Klaasmeyer; Daisy Kone; Barry Moore; Ronnie Self; Mitchell J. Shields; and Ann Walton Sieber.
Cite 66: Inside Stories
Spring 2006
Editor’s Note
Cite 66 was guest edited by Terrence Doody and Karl Kilian. In "Inside Stories," Doody writes:
Buildings are more than their material components. They are made of ideas and values and remade by their inhabitants into another kind of fit, another meaning and explanation. Cities summon strangers together and place them in many kinds of containers, and the containers that we have invented to be buildings and the ones we have invented to be novels have more in common than the pun they share on "story." Buildings and novels also ground the tradition of thinking about architecture and narrative together. Figures of gods and goddesses, women and men, have traditionally adorned temples, churches, and governmental buildings, and their stories are intrinsic to the buildings' significance and function. In traditional narratives, it is the inn on the road that sets the stage for pilgrims and travelers to tell their stories to each other. And this tradition enters the history of the novel in Henry James's famous preface to The Portrait of a Lady, where James writes: "The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million ... every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will." Throughout the 19th century, in fact, there was a whole tradition of novels set in boarding houses and apartment buildings, which contained not only the stories of the novel's characters, but also embodied the culture's ideas about privacy, the street's temptations, and the doctrine of the sexes' separate spheres.