Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation

by Rebecca L. Walkowitz

In this broad-ranging and ambitious intervention in the debates over the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of cosmopolitanism, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that modernist literary style has been crucial to new ways of thinking and acting beyond the nation. While she focuses on modernist narrative, Walkowitz suggests that style conceived expansively as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness helps to explain many other, nonliterary formations of cosmopolitanism in history, anthropology, sociology, transcultural studies, and media studies.

Walkowitz shows that James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W. G. Sebald use the salient features of literary modernism in their novels to explore different versions of transnational thought, question moral and political norms, and renovate the meanings of national culture and international attachment. By deploying literary tactics of naturalness, triviality, evasion, mix-up, treason, and vertigo, these six authors promote ideas of democratic individualism on the one hand and collective projects of antifascism or anti-imperialism on the other. Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf made their most significant contribution to this "critical cosmopolitanism" in their reflection on the relationships between narrative and political ideas of progress, aesthetic and social demands for literalism, and sexual and conceptual decorousness. Specifically, Walkowitz considers Joyce's critique of British imperialism and Irish nativism; Conrad's understanding of the classification of foreigners; and Woolf's exploration of how colonizing policies rely on ideas of honor and masculinity.

Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald have revived efforts to question the definitions and uses of naturalness, argument, utility, attentiveness, reasonableness, and explicitness, but their novels also address a range of "new ethnicities" in late-twentieth-century Britain and the different internationalisms of contemporary life. They use modernist strategies to articulate dynamic conceptions of local and global affiliation, with Rushdie in particular adding playfulness and confusion to the politics of antiracism.

In this unique and engaging study, Walkowitz shows how Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf developed a repertoire of narrative strategies at the beginning of the twentieth century that were transformed by Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald at the end. Her book brings to the forefront the artful idiosyncrasies and political ambiguities of twentieth-century modernist fiction.

Genres: Literary Criticism

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 2006

About the author

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is professor of English and affiliate faculty in the comparative literature program at Rutgers University. Her books are Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006).

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walkowitz does a beautiful job connecting formal readings and an attention to style with a broader interest in ethics, affiliation, and reflection on how social categories are defined. She puts that broader interest under the heading of "critical cosmopolitanism," and she does an outstanding job aligning seemingly apolitical stances (Joyce's "trivialism," for example, or Woolf's "evasion") convincingly with political messages (escaping nationalism in favor of individualism, ducking propaganda with the help of nonsense). For me, the early chapters of the book (Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce) were far more convincing and effective, though this may be because I was not as familiar with the primary texts in the second half of the book, which addresses contemporary writers Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald. Perhaps it is impossible to get as excited about nuanced formal readings of texts that you have not read or hardly remember. That being said, I thought the categories Walkowitz assigned to these writers ("treason," "mix-ups," "vertigo") were less convincing and evident than the stylistic categories that she assigned to the earlier modernists. Sometimes it seemed like she had to stretch those categorical words with a great deal of strain to get the meaning that she wanted out of them. This reminded me of advice I got from a graduate school mentor not to fetishize a single word in critical work, and here I see why that might be problematic. The critic repeating the thematic word sometimes prompts my readerly skepticism about the argument, while without the key word, I might have been able to get into the flow a bit more. Still, I loved the early chapters and especially her reading of "The Two Gallants" by Joyce, which I have taught and enjoyed teaching.