A critical review of some of T.S. Eliot's narrowly ideological invocations of region encourages us to clarify and redefine the term, for Eliot's own experience of the South was of a complex regional culture in which competing and contradictory forces were "inextricably involved with one another."

Robert Jackson completed his doctorate in English at New York University in 2001, and his book The Gilded Land: Seeking The Region In American Literature And Culture will be published in 2005 as part of the Southern Literary Series of LSU Press. At present he is doing postgraduate work in southern history at the University of Virginia.

Introduction | Eliot's Homogeneity | Defining Region | "The Ordinary Business of Living" | Southern Writers Symposium

Imagine what it would be like to gather to one location a group of thinkers and then open discussion of a topic of shared interest—say, the role of region in southern literature—with the following introduction:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...

Among others who already think like we do, defining our terms is rarely a high priority. We feel at home, we feel a sense of community, among like-minded people, which explains in large measure our appreciation for gatherings like this one. Most people forget that "I know it when I see it," the infamous non-definition of pornography by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart, came as part of his concurring opinion in the landmark case of Jacobellus v. Ohio (1964). It's much easier to evade precision when we're on the winning side of an argument.

When talking about region, we all think we know what we're talking about, and we tend to use the word in scores of different ways, and that may be fine as "shorthand" within an informal group of like-minded people. But if we actually try to define our terms for academic precision or clarity, or if we find among ourselves an anarchist or perhaps even a Yankee who lacks our shared cultural understanding and doesn't already know what we're talking about, the term "region" soon finds itself surrounded by quotation marks, its meaning slipping away from beneath us like so much postmodern entropy. The result, we fear, may be exactly the feeling of displacement that our regional identification has often sought to mitigate, if not crush altogether. And so, when it comes to region, we remain vague, resentful of the demands of a fully public discourse, preferring to believe that we know region when we see it.

Introduction | Eliot's Homogeneity | Defining Region | "The Ordinary Business of Living" | Southern Writers Symposium

Published: 21 June 2004

© 2004 Robert Jackson and Southern Spaces