Abstract
How to become modern and, simultaneously, return to sources, how to integrate historical progress and the preservation and availability of cultural traditions has been variously described as a major dilemma of modernity. Underlying this dilemma are differing notions of home and of the role of places and regions in a staggeringly globalized, technology-driven civilization. Regionalist movements, such as Agrarianism in the South of the US, have thrived on their antipathy to a fast changing modern world; they have also promulgated a renewed sense of place and a return to regional history and traditions. The essay discusses critical regionalists’ celebration of the local and the region; in so doing it also looks at two representatives of opposing notions of home in modernity, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, it contends that it is primarily by way of narrative and storytelling that a sense of place, of being-in-the-world can be reconstructed.
Works Cited
Benesch, Klaus (2012). “Cultural Immobility: Thoreau, Heidegger, and the Modern Politics of Place.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 57.3, 403–418.Search in Google Scholar
Berry, Wendell (1978). The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. New York, NY: Avon Books.Search in Google Scholar
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten (2010). “Is Critical Regionalist Philosophy Possible? Some Meta-Philosophical Considerations.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 2.1, 1–15.10.1558/ccp.v2i1.11Search in Google Scholar
Canizaro, Vincent B., gen. ed. (2007). Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.Search in Google Scholar
Flink, James J. (1975). The Car Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Flink, James J. (1988). The Automobile Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Ford, Richard (2006). The Lay of the Land. New York, NY: Knopf.Search in Google Scholar
Frampton, Kenneth (1983). “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle, OE: Bay Press, 16–30.Search in Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1956). The Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree. New York, NY: Dover Publications.Search in Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin (1971 [1951]). “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, NY: Harper, 141–160.Search in Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin (1966 [1976]). “Conversations on a Country Path about Thinking.” Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 58–90.Search in Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin (1993 [1966]). “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.” Richard Wolin, ed. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 91–114.Search in Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno ([1991] 1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel (1990). “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us.” Difficult Freedom: Essays in Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 231–234.Search in Google Scholar
McCarthy, Cormac (2006). The Road. New York, NY: Vintage.Search in Google Scholar
Nye, David (1994). American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Nye, David (1997). Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.Search in Google Scholar
Powell, Douglas (2007). Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Search in Google Scholar
Ransom, Jon Crowe (1977 [1930]). “Reconstructed But Unregenerate.” I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1–27.Search in Google Scholar
Ransom, Jon Crowe (1934). “The Aesthetic of Regionalism.” American Review II, 290–310.Search in Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul (1965 [1961]). “Universal Civilization and National Cultures.” Paul Ricoeur,History and Truth. Trans. Chast A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 271–284.Search in Google Scholar
Ruskin, John (1903). “The Poetry of Architecture; Or The Architecture of the Nations of Europe Considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and National Character.” The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 1 (Poetry of Architecture, Seven Lamps, Modern Painters). New York, NY/Chicago, IL: National Library Association. Project Gutenberg (release 2006) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17774/17774-h/17774-h.htm> (October 20, 2015).Search in Google Scholar
Schäfer, Wolf (2001). “Global Civilization and Local Cultures: A Crude Look at the Whole.” International Sociology 16.3, 301–319.10.1177/026858001016003004Search in Google Scholar
Seiler, Cotton (2008). Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226745657.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Tichi, Cecelia (1979). New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Search in Google Scholar
White, Curtis (2004 [1992]). The Idea of Home. Normal, IL/London: Dalkey Archive Press.Search in Google Scholar
Wolfe, Tom (1981). From Bauhaus to Our House. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.10.2307/3192620Search in Google Scholar
©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- “Space, Place, and Narrative”: A Short Introduction
- Articles
- Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling
- Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015
- A(t) Home on the Frontier: Place, Narrative, and Material Culture in Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham
- The Cathedral of Nature: Sullivan’s and Adler’s Auditorium Building and the Narrative Function of Architecture
- “The Americans are Rumored to be Eccentrics”: On Los Angeles through the Romanian Cultural Lens
- Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age
- Book Reviews
- Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s
- Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur
- The American Novel of War: A Critical Analysis and Classification System
- Books Received