The Decline and Fall of Regionalism in U.S. Writing?

Interesting discussion about the possible decline of regionalism in U.S. writing. Andrew Seal:

That partially answers my objection—”write what you know” can quickly (for some writers, very quickly) become a license to write about the new thing they know best: the life of the writer, which now involves frequent (or at least significant) re-locations. And as Mark Athitakis points out, such a life is fairly different from most Americans: “a majority of Americans haven’t moved from the state in which they grew up, and a majority of those people—more than a third of the U.S. population—have never moved from their hometown,” a point made very dispiritingly two weeks ago on the television show “Glee.” So it’s plausible that a decline in regionalism is due to an increasing divergence between the lives of novelists and the lives of many of their readers—a divergence which is basically polarizing, encouraging workshop-based novelists to retreat farther into a sort of trans-regional culture of academia, or as one commenter on Myers’s post said, “the new regionalism might be academia, the true (often ill-adaptive) region of these writers’ development and allegiance.” Anyone who has spent time in a big Midwestern university town can feel a little bit of this—Bloomington, Indiana can feel like it owes more allegiance to college towns out East than to the towns next door.

D.G. Myers:

The problem is that an entire generation of American writers since 1970 has belonged to a common tradition, sharing a common background and forging common ties:

Richard Ford (MFA, Irvine, 1970)
Kent Haruf (MFA, Iowa, 1973)
Thom Jones (MFA, Iowa, 1973)
T. C. Boyle (MFA, Iowa, 1974) . . .

. . . Joshua Ferris (MFA, Irvine, 2003)
Daniyal Mueenuddin (MFA, Arizona, 2004)

The foregoing list could have been extended even farther. What outsiders to university life may not fully realize is that academic disciplines are organized nationally rather than locally. Academic openings are not advertised in the local paper, but in a national job list. The case of someone like Susan Straight, a native of Riverside, California (my own hometown), who moved up from teaching at the city’s junior college to a professorship at the University of California campus there, is vanishingly rare. Career advancement typically entails packing up and relocating across the country.

I don’t know a whole lot about the system that Myers and Seal are discussing, but I would side very strongly with the idea that a decline of regionalism would impoverish U.S. fiction. It’s a bit of a stretch to map Moretti’s argument from Atlas of the European Novel directly onto this question, but he does make a similar (and convincing) argument: that dominant strains of the French and English novel prevented the development of more regionalist writing in Europe in the 19th century. (Although, perhaps this was all changed after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and now we’re reaping the fruits of all that closed off writing via these amazing translations that continue to reach U.S. shores from Eastern Europe . . .)

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