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GLOBAL VILLAGES: MODERNISM AND THE REGIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE AMERICAN CENTURY By CHRISTINA VAN HOUTEN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2012 1 © 2012 Christina Van Houten 2 To Patrick 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has taught me the value of work. I am grateful that Susan Hegeman has been my mentor for the last six years of my graduate studies. Not only has she vastly improved my thinking and writing, she has taught me the important lesson that good academic work is more than research, teaching, and professionalization. Good academic work also consists of the often unrecognized departmental service, the long hours of union organizing, and the satisfaction that your labor is improving the university workplace. I must likewise thank Phil Wegner for this lesson. Any of the good work that I might have accomplished as a PhD student is largely thanks to his labor on my behalf: as a mentor advocating for me, as a departmental administrator receiving insufficient thanks, and as an adviser organizing the most important community on campus. I am also indebted to Tace Hedrick and Trysh Travis for their crucial comments and suggestions: my dissertation is exponentially better because of them. My colleagues and friends have also improved my work. I thank my dissertation writing group—Wesley Beal, Jordan Dominy, Mike Mayne, and Patrick McHenry—for sharing their work with me and for improving mine with their thoughtful comments and strong criticisms. These guys and the rest of the Marxist Reading Group—Regina Martin, Brian Mann, Matt Mingus, Wylie Lenz, et al.—have underlined the importance of balance: work, activism, companionship, and fun. Some of the most consequential work I have done while wrapping-up my dissertation has been as a member of National Women’s Liberation and Graduate Assistants United. As an activist for the feminist and labor movements, I have learned so much from the strategy sessions, the consciousness raisings, the protests, and the 4 marches. NWL and GAU have also challenged the way I think about the relationships between academic theory and movement work: it is not enough to write a good dissertation or get an academic job. As a female academic (and a feminist academic), I must also work to improve labor conditions, contract language, and social wages. I thank NWL and GAU for their solidarity. Finally, I must thank my family. For many reasons my mother is the strongest woman I know. I thank her for the way that she has always tolerated, encouraged, and supported my work (even when I was an ornery five year-old flying paper-airplane notes downstairs about running out of books to read). I thank my brothers for never letting me take myself too seriously. And I thank Patrick McHenry for being my partner in all things: as officemate, editor, and best friend. With Simon the dog making our family of three, I am quite happy. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 A Regional Framework for Late Modernism ............................................................ 13 Global Villages: Regional Modernism in the American Century .............................. 22 2 RETURNING TO DOMESTIC CULTURE: WILLA CATHER, NELLA LARSEN, AND REGIONAL MODERNISM ............................................................................. 31 Narrative Breaks and Peripheral Modernism .......................................................... 32 Domesticating Regional Modernism ....................................................................... 39 Willa Cather: Regionalism Repairing Toward Modernism ....................................... 46 Nella Larsen: Transatlantic Modernism in a Regional Context ............................... 69 3 THE MAPPING OF AMERICA: GERTRUDE STEIN, GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORIES, AND AESTHETIC GEOPOLITICS ..................................................... 83 Modernist Geography: The Critical Topography of Twentieth-Century America ..... 89 The Late Modernist Turn, Or, Stein Fait Un Four .................................................... 98 Pioneer Returns: Americanization, Middle-Class Domesticity, and Regional Habit .................................................................................................................. 108 4 DAWN POWELL, REGIONAL MODERNISM, AND THE POSTWAR AIR WORLD ................................................................................................................ 117 Regional Antinomies and the Postwar Air World .................................................. 119 Regional Modernism and Uneven Modernity ........................................................ 123 Satire and the American Century .......................................................................... 131 Late Modernism and the Marriage Plot ................................................................. 144 5 BESIDES RAISING SIX CHILDREN BY THREE MARRIAGES: KAY BOYLE AND THE POLITICS OF LATE MODERNISM ...................................................... 155 Domestic Politics: American Citizenship and the American Century .................... 157 The Youngest Camel: Late Modernism and the American Family ........................ 168 Cold War Histories: Postwar Globalization and Regional Frameworks ................. 177 6 DOMESTIC BATTLES & GLOBAL TRAVESL: MARION MAHONY GRIFFIN’S THE MAGIC OF AMERICA AND THE POLITICS OF REGIONAL MODERNISM 185 6 Modernism by Chicago Design ............................................................................. 187 Toward a Politics of Regional Modernism ............................................................. 194 Coda: “The Last Word in Modernism” ................................................................... 207 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 215 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 226 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy GLOBAL VILLAGES: MODERNISM AND THE REGIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE AMERICAN CENTURY By Christina Van Houten August 2012 Chair: Susan Hegeman Major: English In “Global Villages: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century,” I study “regional modernism” as a critical movement in the American Century. My intervention centers on the place of gender in regional modernism. I argue that if this movement is not predominantly driven by women, it is certainly motivated by an explicitly gendered (if not feminist) politics. My dissertation turns on two questions. How might a productive inclusion of gender into the culture debates between the 1920s and 1950s refigure the relationship between regionalism and modernism? How might gender reformulate vernacular culture or International Style such that the alternative model of regional modernism might challenge conventional readings of modernity? My response to these questions draws on the development of regional modernism in the writings of Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, Dawn Powell, Kay Boyle, and Marion Mahony Griffin. Regional modernism politicizes domestic concerns, specifically relating to the family, the home, and representations of domesticity, as ideological alternatives to the increasingly global American Century. 8 My argument is two-part: I trace this development of regional modernism as a cultural concept in the work of Cather, Larsen, and Stein; and I consider the interventions of regional modernism by Powell, Boyle, and Mahony Griffin, paying particular attention to the way in which their work challenges American late modernist developments of aesthetic formalisms, political conservatism, and cultural hegemony. In this context, I offer an alternative genealogy to modernism because I focus on the work of modernist women who otherwise would have been excluded from literary studies because they were women or, more generously, because they were women who wrote texts that were peripheral to modernism. Moreover, this alternative genealogy, aligned with the project of feminist recovery, opens to a larger critical project. I read regional modernism as a crucial mediator between modernism proper and the late modernism of the American Century. Not only does this cultural movement challenge narratives of postwar American exceptionalism and conservative political developments in Cold War America; the collective project of these women challenges the contested space of modernism and the ideology of the domestic front. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION So here and there will force on your consciousness the phenomenon that I will permit myself to call Middle Westishness: the evolution of races, cities, or even civilizations brought about by the crowding out of Far, Wild or Pioneer Wests. This happens politically, as exemplified by the British occupation of India or the French eastern colonies; it happens financially when the great banks, British or North American, having nothing else to do with their