Is Modernism Really Transnational? <em>Ulysses</em>, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger

Abstract

��� W riting in 2007, Richard Begam concluded that “in imagining a Hellas of the north, Joyce might well have envisioned a country not unlike the Irish Republic of today: liberal, prosperous, cosmopolitan, modern—a country that has achieved a distinct cultural identity, while assuming its rightful place within the community of nations” (203). By locating in Joyce’s vision the reconciliation of local particularity and global integration, Begam challenges a dominant tendency in Joyce scholarship and modernist studies that stretches from Ezra Pound to Hugh Kenner to Emer Nolan. Whether Wgured as parochialism versus modernism, nationalism versus internationalism, or nationalism versus metropolitanism, Joycean and modernist critics have traditionally held the local and the global in opposition. Begam’s challenge to this opposition illustrates a fundamental similarity between the recent cosmopolitan turn in Joyce studies and the transnational turn in modernist studies: rather than rely on mutually exclusive conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, both approach their subject matter through a conception of cosmopolitanism that is consistent with and even constitutive of nationalism. Such arguments represent the inXuence of new cosmopolitan theory on literary studies, particularly James Clifford’s theory of “discrepant cosmopolitanism.” In his seminal essay “Traveling Cultures,” Clifford argues that the tendency to view the local and the global as mutually exclusive stems from an understanding of culture as rooted and static. In its place, Clifford offers “discrepant cosmopolitanism”—an alternative conception of culture as dynamic and mobile and of cultural identity as rooted in “speciWc, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction” as well as “routed” in the displacement and transplantation that bring cultures into contact (1997a, 36). Like