Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape / Edition 1

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:	9780807857946
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/19/2007
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.62(d)

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



[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



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

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