A Geography of Resistance

Abstract

Despite it's apparent nostalgia for the village ideal, America's literary modernism largely dispels the romantic antagonism between small-town community and mass society. Drawing from the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy, I advance the notion that community was produced by capitalist society, not destroyed by it. Modulating between a regional and local focus, my readings of American modernists (such as Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer and Hart Crane) elucidate the ways in which writers contradicted their explicit bemoaning of lost community by acknowledging loss as consonant with community as such. Focusing on how emergent technologies in communication and transportation repositioned writers in relation to themselves and each other, I coin the term "mass geography" in order to describe the social flux that enthused hinterlands and small-towns after the war, thereby disrupting the notion that American community is sustained by shared identity, ontological integrity or physical rootedness.