Vertiginous Aspiration

This chapter shows how the aesthetics of vertiginous aspiration and ironic transcendence became central for European writers who have come to be recognized as canonical modernists. It focuses in particular on Guillaume Apollinaire’s visions of “turning towers” in “Zone” and other poems dealing with Parisian modernity and cosmopolitanism; Franz Kafka’s “irony of transcendence” in various short stories and personal writings; Virginia Woolf’s “views from below” in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to essays like “On Being Ill” and “The Leaning Tower”; and images of urban space, post-Christian philosophy, and the aesthetics and politics of sovereignty in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Enchanted Catastrophe

This chapter rethinks Le Corbusier’s idea of New York as an “enchanted catastrophe” by focusing on related concerns about architectural elevation and capitalist “creative destruction” in critical writings about the rise of the modernist American metropolis. In particular, it considers essays by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and novels by John Dos Passos as well as key French texts by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel de Certeau, among others. In turn, it traces the post-World War II shift according to which Paris “lost its hegemony,” as Beauvoir put it, and New York appeared to replace it as the capital of the twentieth century.

Critical Suspension

This final chapter brings the historical argument to a close by examining forms of immanent critique in post-World War II American novels attempting to grapple with the geopolitics of the so-called “American Century.” Particular attention is paid to motifs of dangling, drifting, and “yo-yoing” in novels by Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon as well as relations between the irony of immanence and postmodern, postcolonial, and anti-imperialist re-imaginings of historical narrativization and representation. The chapter concludes by focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony in order to consider how the trope of “ground zero” first emerged in reference to the testing of the atom bomb in the American Southwest, and how the military-industrial development of uranium mining and nuclear power remain closely connected to concerns about American empire and cultural, ecological, and planetary survival in the post-9/11 era.

Cinematic Terror

This chapter discusses Alfred Hitchcock’s American films after he moved from England to Hollywood, and especially the ways in which they displaced transatlantic fears and anxieties of wartime onto cinematic and urban spaces as well as what Chris Marker called the “vertigo of time.” After considering the history of embodied suspense and terror from Thomas Hardy’s invention of the “cliffhanger” to Harold Lloyd’s comic dangling in Safety Last!, it focuses above all on Hitchcock’s Vertigo while also examining other key films from Rebecca to The Birds. In turn, it considers relations between history and geography, depth psychology and the built environment, and conceptions of memory, temporality, and contingency from Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust to Gilles Deleuze.

Coda

The Coda considers how the book’s historical critique of modernist verticality can help us develop more nuanced ways of rethinking more current discourses of the horizontal imagination, including decades-old arguments about the “depthlessness,” “shallowness,” and “groundlessness” of contemporary culture as well as the rhetoric of horizontal flows, digital utopias, and the global commons. In particular, it calls for further recognition of the growing ecological crisis and the persistence of social stratification and uneven development despite calls for “flat” conceptions of the social. It concludes by arguing that a more multi-layered and multi-dimensional understanding of the past and the future may be necessary for confronting the challenges of the present.

Transatlantic Topographies

This first chapter explores the geographical and historical sweep of the modernist vertical imagination in both Europe and the Americas. It begins with comparisons between Franz Kafka’s imagined Amerika and Max Weber’s writings on the “spirit of capitalism” after traveling to the United States, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptions of racial stratification and uplift after studying in Germany. From here, it considers the rise of American empire and capitalist culture in terms of industrial scale, vertical elevation, and the “technological sublime.” Key examples include Eugene Jolas’ Verticalist movement in relation to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in relation to the rise of New York City; major writings by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, George Oppen, and Claude McKay; and conceptions of racial stratification, uplift, and solidarity in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

Introduction

This introduction presents the book’s central argument about the shifting discourses of verticalism and modernism, develops close readings of exemplary texts, and addresses key theoretical debates about relations between nature, culture, and capitalist urbanization. In particular, it discusses the significance of architecture, urban space, and racial and colonial discourse in the film King Kong, especially in comparison to Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, offers a brief intellectual history of the dialectics of “up and down” and “high and low” from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the writings of Marx and Engels and post-structuralist and contemporary theory, and re-examines theories of metaphor in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and modern poetics. It concludes with a brief summary of the five chapters that follow.