Susan Bernstein's Housing Problems: Writing and Building in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger examines how architectural terminology organizes literary and philosophical texts. She presents striking new scholarship, moving clearly beyond the first forays to unearth the architecture of metaphysical thought. This is an important work that will be read by architects, literary critics, and philosophers alike. -- Daniel Purdy * Comparative Literature Studies *
In her highly original new study, Housing Problems, Susan Bernstein compares the actuality of built architecture with the concept behind it in private homes belonging to Goethe, Horace Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger . . . In Bernstein's hands, objective truth does not seem to exist, but rather gives way to multiple truths. Bernstein makes this apparent in the collage-like manner with which she treats her subject, but also with the elegant, often poetic, language she employs. She loves to deal in opposites, joining them together so they become parts of a whole, rather than dichotomous constructs in a way the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown would have loved. -- Deborah Ascher Barnstone * German Studies Review *
Professor Susan Bernstein is an accomplished scholar and a key figure in the fields that she commands. Housing Problems, to my knowledge unique, interprets material practices of historical restoration and presentation together with fictional, autobiographical, and philosophical texts. I am delighted to see that Bernstein has won the support of award-winning photographer Suzanne Doppelt, who in a recent article in France, was designated as the Man Ray of our era. This book is bound to open a stirring chapter in the history of outstanding collaboration and genuine thoughta truly rare collation of intellectual energies. -- Avital Ronell * New York University *
To read across Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger is to be part of a genuinely novel interpretive experience . . . Literature's encounter with architecture, via Bernstein's book, might become productive for knowledge and debates that exist within literary theory. -- Charles Rice * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
