Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation April Bullock Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation By Rebecca L. Walkowitz. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) In Cosmopolitan Style, Rebecca Walkowitz’s analysis of modernist literary style and its contribution to new forms of international engagement and new ways of practicing political criticism is creative and refreshing. Drawing on an impressive group of disparate theorists and theoretical debates, Walkowitz persuasively argues for the political importance of literary modernism’s focus on seemingly trivial events, disoriented thought and language, and a refusal to engage directly in transparent struggles for progressive international engagement to the creation of late-twentieth century cosmopolitan literary style. Critical cosmopolitanism is a distinctive type of international engagement that is averse to “heroic tones of appropriation and progress” and wary of “epistemological privilege” that takes for granted “a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is being seen” (2). Walkowitz breaks new ground with her insistence that this modernist literary style should be treated politically, and that traditional models of modernist exile should be replaced by “more dynamic models of migration, entanglement, and mix-up” (6). Her introduction lays the theoretical groundwork—which is far too complex for the scope of this review—that informs her close readings of the works of six authors in the chapters that follow. Walkowitz moves easily between the philosophical cosmopolitan tradition that begins with Kant, to more recent debates surrounding modernist cosmopolitanism that focus on anticolonialism, multiculturalism, and migration. In the works of James Clifford, Homi K. Bhabha, and Bruce Robbins, Walkowitz finds “new theories of sharing, which value the partial allegiances and unassimilated communities that for many constitute home” (10). This cosmopolitan style can be seen in the works of all of the authors she analyzes leading them to draw attention to the ways in which we might reimagine the relationships between center and periphery and see connections between international cultures as well as the lack of coherence within national culture, specifically twentieth century Britain. In part one of the book, Walkowitz elucidates the repertoire of cosmopolitan modernist narrative styles developed by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad in the early twentieth century. In her readings, narrative tactics of evasion, triviality, and naturalness are developed as means of resisting colonialism, militarism and imperialism. In part two, Walkowitz explores the ways in which late twentieth-century novelists have expanded and built upon the tactics of cosmopolitan modernism to build a modernist cosmopolitanism. Thus Salman Rushdie’s mix-ups, Kazou Ishiguro’s treason, and W.G. Sebald’s vertigo are developed as critical attitudes that “circulate and provoke new conceptions of self and community” (27). Walkowitz skillfully employs contemporary criticism of the authors in her study to show how each of them subverts critical expectations. This is especially apparent in her treatment of Conrad and Ishiguro. Critics in the early twentieth century applauded Conrad for bringing a Polish sensibility to British literature while simultaneously condemning his decision to write in English. What they overlooked was the way in which Conrad’s project was to draw attention to the artificiality of English culture, how social expectations created supposedly natural national identity. Ishiguro’s work exemplifies the double consciousness that Walkowitz argues is central to critical cosmopolitanism. In his stories and novels, Ishiguro promotes the idea that national culture is an achieved fiction, and that styles or cultures that claim to be authentic and true are less trustworthy than those that do not pretend to authenticity or truth. Thus for Ishiguro treason may be more reliable than allegiance to collective identities and values that are constructed to create boundaries between inside and outside, and also within national culture. The chapter on Virginia Woolf counters critics who have argued that Woolf’s fiction failed to engage in purposeful and direct criticism of militarism and fascism, especially in Mrs. Dalloway. Instead, Walkowitz argues that Woolf’s apparent refusal to engage offered an alternative to modes of thought and narrative structures Woolf associated with militarism and fascism. Woolf’s evasions become tactics of engagement, tactics that will provide a rich legacy for the late twentieth century novelists in the second half of the book. Cosmopolitan Style...