Architecture and poetry: The universality of the modern

Architectural historians have studied buildings as figures of religious, political, aesthetic, or other meaning in diverse traditions and periods. Similarly literary historians have investigated the ways in which architecture functions as a figure for meaning in poetry across languages and cultures. Scholars in both disciplines have assumed that architecture can serve as a figure without interrogating, however, the relation between built and verbal figures as radically different forms of the aesthetic. The task, for architectural and literary scholars alike, is to define their object of study in relation to the aesthetic. This study argues that apparently material, non-verbal buildings and immaterial, verbal figures, the latter a defining characteristic of poetry, mark oppositional forms of the aesthetic that nonetheless share a common aesthetic function, both generating an infinite succession of brief and partial meanings. How does the relation of architecture and poetry, as formally oppositional but functionally similar modalities of art, inflect our understanding of the aesthetic? Given the entanglement of architecture and poetry within the field of the aesthetic, how do each of these arts inform the conception of the other?;The most explicit, comprehensive treatment of these questions occurs in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, which identifies the relation of architecture and poetry as the defining dialectic of the aesthetic. The neglect of the conceptual entanglement of architecture and poetry in Hegel studies by most scholars has had immense consequences, resulting in persistent misreadings of the relation in his work between physical architecture and discursive "architectonics," as well as of his conception of the aesthetic, language, and history. This study thus emphasizes the need, in the wake of Hegel, for a systematic understanding of the aesthetic dimension of history and of the historiographical dimension of scholarship across the humanities. Proceeding from Hegel to Mallarme and Hart Crane, two poets that engage Hegelian architectonics in terms of the relation between architecture and poetry, this study ultimately examines the implications of the entanglement of architectonics and history on notions of modernity, particularly in the globalized contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism. The three thinkers under discussion share an interest in the relation between architectonics and history; in particular they engage the entanglement of architecture and poetry in their writings on the culturally or conceptually "foreign" or "universal." Accordingly, this study focuses on the neglected Orientalist and "universalist" writings of Hegel and Mallarme and the Caribbean poems of Hart Crane, finding that the relation in these texts between architecture and architectonics -- that is, between building and the poetic delineation of referents in historical time -- reveals the necessary fluidity of all cultural and historical concepts, categories, and objects. This conception of architectonics culminates in Crane's surprising conception of "modernity" as "spiritual articulation," the unfolding of the real by a universal, human "will" endlessly shedding particularity. Linking the underlying universality of the aesthetic to an epistemology of human agency with respect to history, the texts under discussion challenge the historiographical armature of scholarship across the humanities and open up fresh perspectives on contemporary, postcolonial attempts to articulate an inclusive, globalized modernity. I hope this critique of aesthetic, cultural, and historical categories will be of interest to a broad range of scholars, contributing to the way architectural and literary critics, philosophers working in epistemology and aesthetics, researchers in postcolonial and cultural studies, and historians view their objects of study.