{"id":51,"date":"2010-11-24T11:55:40","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T11:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/?p=51"},"modified":"2016-06-07T17:47:45","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T17:47:45","slug":"regional-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/?p=51","title":{"rendered":"Regional Modernism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Accessed 24.11.2010
\nhttp:\/\/gradworks.umi.com\/32\/72\/3272054.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Regional modernism: The vanishing landscape in American literature and culture, 1896–1952 <\/strong>
\n(Sarah Orne Jewett, \u00c2\u00a0Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison)<\/p>\n

by Shimotakahara, Leslie, PhD, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007, 0 pages; 3272054<\/p>\n

Abstract: For traditional literary criticism, the term ‘Regional Modernism’ no doubt represents a contradiction in terms. By idealizing communities tied to the soil, regional fiction gratifies the tastes of urban middle-class readerships that could still imagine their origins in this kind of locale at the fin-de-si\u00c3\u00a8cle. Modernism, by sharp contrast, addresses an international readership detached from any soil or homeland. Coining the term ‘regional modernism’ is my way of suggesting that, during the early twentieth century, major American novelists appropriated the language of regionalism and reworked it by means of aesthetic strategies we now characterize as modernist. Modernism simultaneously offers the reader a sense of experience specific to an American place and yet renders that place a phantasm that an individual carries within his consciousness. Beginning with Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, I argue that this famous regional novel acknowledges a problem in representing a place of origins: as rural New England is flooded by mass culture, it loses its semblance as a unique folk culture and thus its ability to designate origins. The next chapter considers how Wharton’s The House of Mirth imagines a high culture distinct and apart from the economy as a means of resurrecting the culture of ‘Old New York’ that mass culture effaced. Turning to The Professor’s House, I show how Cather seeks a form of aesthetic compensation for the way that conspicuous consumption disfigures the Midwest. She creates a purely imaginary landscape that her protagonist contains within his head as a fantasy of the primitive origins of universal man. My next chapter proposes that Faulkner appropriates this method in Absalom! Absalom! to represent the South as the white nation’s authentic identity. His fiction collaborates with a sociological school called the ‘New Regionalism’ in mystifying the South’s economic history of slave labor and remaking it as an organic folk culture. The dissertation concludes by asking what an African-American writer has to do to write as a modernist. I argue that Invisible Man seizes on cosmopolitan modernism’s stereotype of the African as nature incarnate and reshapes it into a black subject characterized by unique individuality.<\/p>\n

Advisor: Armstrong, Nancy
\nSchool: BROWN UNIVERSITY
\nSource: DAI-A 68\/07, p. 2947, Jan 2008
\nSource Type: DISSERTATION
\nSubjects: American literature
\nPublication Number: 3272054<\/p>\n

Adobe PDF Access the complete dissertation:<\/p>\n

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies<\/strong>
\nVolume 55, Number 1, Spring 2009<\/p>\n

E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724<\/p>\n

DOI: 10.1353\/mfs.0.1596
\nAfterword:
\nRegional Modernism and Transnational Regionalism
\nMarjorie Pryse<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the 2002 Modernist Studies Association Fourth Annual Conference, several of us participated in a seminar titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Regionalism and the Modern.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d1 In the discussion that revolved around previously shared position papers, seminar participants considered the idea that regionalism allows modernism to be understood as a crisis of definition. The seminar developed the idea of modernism as a process of layering\u00e2\u20ac\u201din space, of regions; in the social world, of identities; and in narrative, of time\u00e2\u20ac\u201da sedimentation that excavates the regionalist bedrock of the modern text. Earlier in the conference we had listened to Simon Gikandi note (in his plenary talk \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the process of developing categories in modernity depends on the purification of categories.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He argued that modernism derives its energy from the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153other,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but that the institutions of modernism \u00e2\u20ac\u0153separate out and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctame\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 the sources\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of that very energy, as when museums of modern art categorize African art as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153primitive\u00e2\u20ac\u009d instead of as integral to the history of art. For Gikandi, the region of Africa creates an epiphany of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is for the moderns.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Modernism becomes transnational when Gikandi explores the relationship between regional\u00e2\u20ac\u201dAfrican\u00e2\u20ac\u201dart and modernism. At the same time, modernism becomes regional, and the challenge to modernism becomes one of including heterogeneity and global regions in its categories. [End Page 189]<\/p>\n

Accessed: 24.11.2010
\nhttp:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/modern_fiction_studies\/v055\/55.1.pryse.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accessed 24.11.2010 http:\/\/gradworks.umi.com\/32\/72\/3272054.html Regional modernism: The vanishing landscape in American literature and culture, 1896–1952 (Sarah Orne Jewett, \u00c2\u00a0Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison) by Shimotakahara, Leslie, PhD, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007, 0 pages; 3272054 Abstract: For traditional literary criticism, the term ‘Regional Modernism’ no doubt represents a contradiction in terms. By idealizing communities tied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1,23,24,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-geography","category-journal","category-literature","category-regional-modernism","category-research","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/rpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}