Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. A couple of examples of this spike in interest: Wiley published the massive A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America in 2003 as part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture Series; in 2009, Modern Fiction Studies published a special issue on regional modernism. 2. See Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things (84–92) for an interesting discussion of the parallels between Jewett’s fiction and museum curatorship, both of which, according to Brown, reproduce place “as knowledge” (86). 3. See Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” for more on the concentric logic of cosmopolitanism. 4. The phrase “practices of everyday life” is a reference to Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). For more on Hegeman’s notion of “spatiality” in the formation of modern conceptions of “culture,” see Patterns for America (32–65). 5. For some great work in this vein, see the Modern Fiction Studies special issue “Regional Modernism” 55.1 (2009). 6. Lutz corrects his periodization almost immediately after he makes it. He also has a chapter in Cosmopolitan Vistas, titled “After 1930,” that surveys the persistence of regional cosmopolitanism in American fiction. 7. See Glazener’s appendix on the Atlantic group of periodicals for more discussion of this commitment to centralizing their cultural trusteeship (257–266). 8. Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters and Foote’s Regional Fictions are both mainstays of this line of scholarship on regional fiction. 9. See Anthony Hilfer’s classic The Revolt from the Village (1969) for more on these writers’ crusades against provincialism. 132 Notes to Pages xiv–xxi 10. Hilfer is making an obvious reference to an often-quoted, enigmatic passage in chapter 20 of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), in which the German trader Stein advises Marlow to “immerse” himself in the “destructive element,” suggesting that the only way to understand the self in the context of the turmoil of modern life is to submit totally to the turmoil. 11. “Program era” is Mark McGurl’s term for fiction produced in the context of creative writing programs. 12. This “poem” is printed in the front matter of her collection of craft essays, The Faith of a Writer (2003), and is reprinted on so many of her lecture-tour pamphlets. 13. Oates has long been an advocate for a renewal of regionalism in contemporary fiction. In her introduction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Oates answers the question—“Is American literature at its core a literature of regions?”—in the affirmative. Contemporary writers resemble one another “along lines that have less to do with traditional American themes than with . . . highly specific, brilliantly realized American places” (6). 14. See Foer’s interview with Robert Birnbaum for more on Oates’s role in Foer’s career. 15. For more on O’Connor’s formative role in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as her academic credentials, see McGurl’s “Understanding Iowa: Flannery O’Connor, B.A., M.F.A.” 16. Here’s how limitation theology works: a writer “transcends its limitations only by staying within them” (O’Connor quoted in McGurl, Program Era, 154). This idea of transcendence carries religious connotations, which is to say that it is obviously polarizing. O’Connor’s commitment to transcendence is likely a result of her Catholicism. See Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) for a discussion of O’Connor’s Catholicism. 17. The essay fetched an entire anthology of rebuttals, For Love of Country? (Cohen, 1996). 18. I’m alluding to the title of Pinsky’s recent contribution to the Rice University Campbell Lectures, Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town (2009). 19. Even in Brooks’s time, these kinds of celebrations were reserved for such disillusioned reformers as Granville Hicks, who, in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact, gave up on progressive politics and embraced small-town conservatism. In 1939, Hicks resigned from the Communist Party, and in the 1950s he was a cooperativewitnessbeforetheHouseCommitteeonUn -AmericanActivities.In1946, he published Small Town, his celebration of island-community parochialism. 20. “Against Theory,” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, which originally appeared in Critical Inquiry (8.4), incited a number of responses. Those responses are collected in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Notes to Pages xxi–3 133 Pragmatism (1985). The most accessible and direct...