Veranstaltungen Homegrounds: Valuing Place and Region in Contemporary Literature

This symposium examines the role and relevance of place and region in today’s literary field. We begin from the observation that sensibilities of place have shifted in two distinct ways. 

On the level of lived experience, perceptions of regional and national belonging have been affected by processes of heritage-making, including patrimonialization (Boltanski) and the cultural branding or place-making of regions and regional identities. Contrary to earlier modernization and globalization paradigms that anticipated a wholesale loss of place, recent decades have witnessed a “return of the region,” tied both to the renaissance of urban centers and to practices of “territorial branding” and new rhetorics of authenticity and place. 

On the level of literary prestige, however, place has had a more ambivalent career at the level of prizewinning production. Whereas the nineteenth-century boom in local-color writing invested region with value, the contemporary label “literary regionalist” can connote the more modest, commercially oriented ambitions of a local “cottage industry,” where the mystery novel may sit alongside the travel guide or the advertisement for regional cuisine. It seems that regionalisms of high literary ambition distinguish themselves from mainstream regionalist branding in several ways. One is to combine valuations of place with moral platforms (as in Claire Vaye Watkins countercultural Nevada fiction, Barbara Kingsolver’s defense of Appalachia, or Wendell Berry’s ecocritical work). Another is to integrate regional atmospheres within literary frameworks that emphasize craft and thematic complexity, often exploring the layered past of the region in the context of a wider national history or concepts of identity (think of Marylinne Robinson’s Iowa novels, the South in Toni Morrison, the West in Cormac McCarthy, or the Great Plains in Louise Erdrich). Yet phenomenologies of place continue to play an important role in literary explorations of belonging. 

This workshop wishes to encourage reflections on uses of place and region, which might involve (but are not limited to) the following questions: 

—How does place/region figure in contemporary publishing, in both commercial and prestige economies? How does it relate to genre branding and canonization? 
—How does the value of place shift across literary fields (in the US or the world?). How do specific regions emerge in wider cultural imaginaries (national, or international) or national vs. world-literary canons?
—How does region/place circulate across different fields of cultural production (commercial vs. literary fiction)?
—What is the role of atmospheres of home/belonging (Heimatatmosphären) in contemporary literature? 
—How does contemporary fiction relate place to other traditional frames of belonging (spaces of nationhood, ethnicity, race, or other notions of identity-relevant authenticity). 
—What new insights do depictions of place yield about place and belonging, place and cultural/ethnic identity?
—How do contemporary authors (re)imagine established narratives/depictions of place/the region and localized histories? 

Günter Leypoldt
Valentina Lopez Liendo 
(University of Heidelberg)