Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape

by Douglas Reichert Powell

Overview

The idea of "region" in America has often served to isolate places from each other, observes Douglas Reichert Powell. Whether in the nostalgic celebration of folk cultures or the urbane distaste for "hicks," certain regions of the country are identified as static, insular, and culturally disconnected from everywhere else. In Critical Regionalism, Reichert Powell explores this trend and offers alternatives to it.

Reichert Powell proposes using more nuanced strategies that identify distinctive aspects of particular geographically marginal communities without turning them into peculiar "hick towns." He enacts a new methodology of critical regionalism in order to link local concerns and debates to larger patterns of history, politics, and culture. To illustrate his method, in each chapter of the book Reichert Powell juxtaposes widely known texts from American literature and film with texts from and about his own Appalachian hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee. He carries the idea further in a call for a critical regionalist pedagogy that uses the classroom as a place for academic writers to build new connections with their surroundings, and to teach others to do so as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469606743
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Douglas Reichert Powell teaches writing, American literature, and cultural studies in the department of English at Columbia College Chicago.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. There's Something about Mary: The Practice of Critical Regionalism

Chapter 1. Rhetorics of Place and Region: An Appalachian Trail

Chapter 2. From the Playground to the Dumping Ground: Making Regional Connections in Unlikely Places

Chapter 3. Panoramas of Gore and Other Social Inventions: Region on Film

Chapter 4. We Have Only Words Against: Toward a Critical Regionalist Literature

Chapter 5. Scholar Holler: Critical Regionalism and the University

Epilogue. There's Something about Mary (Reprise): Mrs. Edwards and Me

Appendix: Durham Stories

Works Cited

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An important book.—Journal of Appalachian Studiesl



Important to Iowans and anybody else who lives away from centers of national power.—The Annals of Iowa



Necessarily suggestive, open-ended, and tentative. . . . Envisions new and utopian possibilities for thought and social action while acknowledging the formidable tactical and theoretical obstacles to such changes.—CHOICE



[Reichert Powell's] endeavor to uncover a critical regionalist literary aesthetic leads from an examination of the film Pulp Fiction (1994) to literary critiques of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). . . . Raises important questions for any scholarly understanding of the South as region.—Journal of Southern History



Reichert Powell proposes a plan to improve the futures of geographically, culturally, and economically marginal communities in the United States by reconfiguring the ways in which they imagine themselves and the ways other, more powerful places imagine them as well. His analysis invites reading and contemplation from a wide range of disciplines—from literature, film, and media studies to pedagogy to regional studies—and specialists from one field will have their eyes opened by the way he sheds useful light on other fields, demonstrating perhaps unforeseen connections among different areas of study.—Kent C. Ryden, University of Southern Maine



Reichert Powell insightfully explores the particularities of his home region of east Tennessee as a window into the larger issues not only of the Appalachian region, but also of regionalism as a site of political and cultural analysis. His perspective is fresh, his writing lucid and graceful, his case studies wide ranging, and his analysis at times quite stunning.—David E. Whisnant, author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region

Editorial Reviews

Offers useful and accessible interpretive tools and a powerful interpretative lens with which to ponder region and culture.—Journal of American Studies



If you do not experience Doug Reichert Powell's remarkable skills at close reading for yourself, you are missing out. Critical Regionalism is essential reading for publicly engaged intellectuals anywhere.—Journal of Appalachian Studies



[Filled] with a bevy of literary, geographic, cinematic, and historical sites.—American Literary History

From the Publisher