Not Quite at Home: Architecture, Authenticity and Transmodernity in Rachel Seiffert's Architect

Contemporary British writer Rachel Seiffert has attracted critical interest primarily within holocaust and trauma literary theory, particularly with its focus on post-memory and the problematics of reconciling memory and historical ‘truth’ in artistic representation in her award-winning novel, The Dark Room. This paper, however, addresses how Seiffert employs the spatial poetics of architecture, building and home to articulate a contemporary psychic-phenomenological reality through an exploration of the short story ‘The Architect’ in the collection Field Study (2005). Informed by philosophical notions of dwelling, unhomeliness, and a phenomenology of space, I argue that Seiffert’s spatial poetics may provide multiple interpretative possibilities, but essentially speaks to a critical assessment of the contemporary condition and I suggest evokes a dwelling based on humanistic values and, thus, gestures towards a philosophy of transmodernity. Keywords, anxiety, alienation, architecture, building, dwelling, home, nomadic, spatial poetics,