Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest

The Global Remapping of American Literature ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0007 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Giles

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Pacific Northwest ◽

Critical Distance ◽

William Gibson ◽

Gary Snyder ◽

Domestic Security ◽

The Pacific ◽

Richard Brautigan ◽

Douglas Coupland

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. Elettra Bedon coined the term “metaregionalism” to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect. On analogy with metafiction, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. The chapter first considers the epistemology of space before discussing how the Pacific Northwest was tackled in the writings of Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, and Richard Brautigan. It also analyzes the fiction of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland; Gibson deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.

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The Global Remapping of American Literature

10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.001.0001 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 33

Author(s):

Paul Giles

Keyword(s):

Native Americans ◽

American Literature ◽

Pacific Northwest ◽

Herman Melville ◽

Literary History ◽

Gertrude Stein ◽

First Century ◽

William Gilmore Simms ◽

The Pacific ◽

American Literary History

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the American Civil War, the book identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. It contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, the book suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. It considers why European medievalism and the prehistory of Native Americans were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It also analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.

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