650 American Literature
Lived most of his adult life in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich, yet he continued to write about Dublin. Certainly places little known and unimportant to use seldom elicit strong memories. Secondly, tastes, ideas, and values are shaped in every individual, at least to some extent, by the places where he or she lives. New Yorkers are almost notoriously different than Texas. Can such a difference be entirely set aside when a New Yorkers reads Goodbye to a River (John Graves is not mentioned in the CLHUS) or when a Texas reads The Bonfire of the Vanities? Probably not, for regional differences may shape the unconscious, and critics such as David Bleich and Norman Holland say that the unconscious exerts some influence over our literary judgments.
But if Regionalism is a factor- perhaps a very important one- then why is it so often overlooked or slighted by the nation’s leading critics and literary historians? Because regional (as Raymond Williams points out in Keywords) is generally taken to mean inferior; and cities such as New York and London are not usually perceived as being part of a region, even though they obviously are. Also, the dominant region is usually the one that educates a nation’s leading critics and scholars; most of them live in that region; and most of them look to it for standards. Is it just a coincidence that almost all of the contributors to the CLHUS teach at universities in the East or California? Moreover, cultural hegemony often remains long after political and economic power have passed from one region to another. No conscious conspiracy needs to exist in order for the once-dominant region to retain cultural control, for scholars from the hinterlands know well that it is in their own self-interest to devote their professional lives to Hawthorne or Melville rather than to A.B. Guthrie or Virginia Sorenson.
But why should anyone devote a career to the study of a region’s literature? More specifically, what has the West contributed to the national culture to warrant such study? Its authors have evinced an overriding concern for ecology and the nuclear peril, as a glance at LHAW makes clear. Indeed, when one considers that the industrialized world has been rushing headlong into either ecocide or a nuclear holocaust, then it is astonish-
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 264-66