American regionalist modernism: Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Sandra Cisneros

My dissertation, "American Regionalist Modernism: Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Sandra Cisneros," analyzes the regionalist writing of the high modernists Cather and Faulkner in conjunction with that of the Chicano writers Acosta and Cisneros, and in doing so it redefines the history and nature of American modernism. Put more explicitly, my project redefines the history by extending it and recharacterizes the nature by demonstrating that region is the central category that links these seemingly disparate movements across time. To this end, my dissertation delineates the strategies of American regionalist modernism, which are remarkably consistent in certain novels by these four authors---namely in Cather's O Pioneers!, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Acosta's The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People , and Cisneros's Caramelo---and which include the following: the representation of region as place/space; the use of region to establish limitations; the representation of "failure" as paradigmatic for how individual characters negotiate the imperatives of region; the consistent deployment of modernist techniques; and the construction of the region as contingent yet distinct from the nation. An abiding concern for all four authors is the manner in which region plays a decisive role in the construction of normative identities that subsume and give structure to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race; as a result, they are equally preoccupied with how region can operate as a site for the creation of counter-hegemonic cultural identities.; As a regionalist critique of modernism and as a modernist investigation of Chicano writing, my dissertation has three larger implications: it concretely delineates a national component to modernism, which is evaluated most commonly as a transnational phenomenon; it realigns the American canon by destabilizing the categories of "major" and "minor" literatures; and, it underscores the importance of region to the ongoing and interdisciplinary construction of "American-ness" itself.