Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

In discussions of regional literature, it is customary today to begin with a negative reference to the "old concept" of national literature. In a period of newly discovered interest in so-called noncanonical literature sparked by the necessity of a multicultural approach, it is imperative that there be a reexamination of the traditional attempts to define the field. This goes along with a comparable effort to restructure the canon from the point of view of, as Edward Said calls it, a "changed ecology."1 If the "old" modernist intellectual--fundamentally a deraciné--saw literature as a "strategy of permanent exile," as a fundamental dis-placement (ostraneniye in Viktor Shklovsky's and atopie in Roland Barthes's formulation),2 we should be ready to recognize the "new" intellectual as, quite literally, an ecologist, someone who speaks from a place. It is from this perspective that I am tempted to take W. H. New (and isn't it true that nomina numina sunt, after all?) as the exemplary host to introduce the main assumption behind regionalism and the literature of place--namely, the idea that today "regionalism is a more appropriate frame within which to read literature than is nationalism."3

Yet, how is the notion of regionalism, unlike that of nationalism, to take into account the exponential growth of New's variables? The "spatialization" of marginality, its metaphoric translation into a (regional) place, raises many problems. For instance, is not this model flawed by its tendency to essentialize regional cultures, attributing to them a new sort of organic unity, undivided by "economics, gender, race, creed"? In what sense is regionalism "more appropriate" than nationalism? Can it be that the regional community is "more natural," and thus less divided, than--in Benedict Anderson's phrase-the "imagined community" of the nation? As a matter of fact, there is a certain tendency to see regions as loci of a via naturaliterto life and communal existence--a tendency that might have begun with John Crowe Ransom's 1934 essay, "The Aesthetic of Regionalism":

Regionalism is as reasonable as ... cosmopolitanism, progressivism, industrialism, free trade, interregionalism, internationalism, eclecticism, liberal education, the federation of the world, or simple rootlessness. Regionalism is really more reasonable, for it is more natural, and whatever is natural is persistent.4

1. Edward W. Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 4 (1989): 11; hereafter abbreviated "YD."

2. See George Steiner, Extraterritorial (New York, 1971); Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), pp. 1-57; and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977).

3. W. H. New, "Beyond Nationalism: On Regionalism," World Literature Written in English 23 (Winter 1984): 13; hereafter abbreviated "BN."

4. John Crowe Ransom, "The Aesthetic of Regionalism," Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated "AR."