When I worked there, Syracuse University didn’t have an English Department but instead offered a Textual Studies Department. This was a response to the traditional historical coverage model’s severe and expanding failings. Why concentrate solely on American, British, and Irish writers? What about Canadian, Australian, Indian, Jamaican, South African writing? Were these works not “English” literature? Also, the demographics of the writers actually read seemed limited too. The “textual studies” model replaced the specific hierarchical “classics” curriculum with students employing different ways to read any text. One semester, no Shakespeare courses offered. The next there would be four—a Feminist or a Marxist interpretation, or Queer or Race based theory. These “Sites of Contestation” (gender, race, class, sexuality—identity characteristics) were argued over, championed, dismissed, revised. The focus had shifted from the classic book, poem, play to a personal, political, theoretical, and cultural critique.
As a “creative” writer in such a department, I recognized I was on the periphery of the discussion, but I couldn’t help kidding (was I kidding?) my colleagues from time to time. “What about ‘Place?’” I would ask them. Might locale, region, neighborhood, or borough also be considered a “Site of Contestation”? After all, political power, the vote, is vested by where one lives. When I list the descriptors of my identity (white, cis-male, straight, middle-class) I do often also lead with “Hoosier.” My colleagues back then were pretty skeptical. Regional Literature had already been demoted to mere Local Color and replaced, a century ago (due to mass communication, increased mobility, and internal migrations from farm to factory, rural to urban) by an “American” Literature.
Float Up, Sing Down, Laird Hunt’s new book of connected stories, set in rural Indiana, got me thinking once again about “Regional” writing and “American” literature. Each story, focused on a day in the life of one of fourteen characters, is a well-made realistic transparent fiction that effortlessly transports the reader into the sweet spot of the waking dream. Each story, too, addresses expertly the “deep” character of the character, the sub- and un- conscious engines of trauma or bliss that produce the telling gestures of transformation and the double takes of epiphany. The details are exact, crisp, and charged. Hunt’s eye for them and his hand at rendering are exquisite. The book flap copy makes comparisons to the “tradition” of Cather and Anderson. I would add to the contemporaries also cited, Elizabeth Strout and Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich and Janet Kauffman. The case being made is that Float Up, Sing Down is a work of “American” fiction. That might be true. Probably is true. But I would also locate the book in its locale. I read the book as a new kind of invigorated unapologetic Neo-Regionalism, the stories written for people of the region more than about the region’s people. If you would like me to get theoretical—let’s go Post-Colonial, a new Site of Contestation. Float Up, Sing Down does many things well, but I most admire its New Hoosierness.
