Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review)

Rebecca Walkowitz situates her ambitious book at the heart of a wide range of contemporary discussions in modernist and cultural studies: the relationship between literary style and political critique; competing definitions of modernism and its relation to postcoloniality; the place of affect in critical thinking and critical theory; the role of literature in cultural studies; relationships between modernism and globalization; and debates about cosmopolitanism. Very broadly, she aims to revise, perhaps ultimately replace, the familiar notion of international modernism by reconceiving it through what she calls "critical cosmopolitanism," a version of global consciousness in which "critical" is meant to invoke both the sociology of knowledge associated with critical theory and also a "critique of critique" aimed at restoring a range of affective conditions and social attitudes, such as distraction, confusion, and attachment, that are typically devalued in familiar modes of critique. To this end, Walkowitz focuses on "novels that develop and examine new attitudes of cosmopolitanism … in the service of … specific projects of democratic individualism … and of antifascism or anti-imperialism" (4). James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as one might expect, meet these criteria, while Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford (neither of whom is discussed) do not. Joseph Conrad, a less obvious candidate for critical cosmopolitanism, is included, and for good reason: overtly committed to conservatism, he was radical by temperament. But Cosmopolitan Style also broadens the usual historical scope of modernism in order to show how models of cosmopolitanism developed in early modernism have been revived and modified. Part 1, "Cosmopolitan Modernism," devotes chapters to Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, and Part 2, "Modernist Cosmopolitanism," to Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald. This historical narrative highlights the author's boldest claims, that "there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices" and that recognition of critical cosmopolitanism's debt to modernism entails a new understanding of the relationship between cultural expression and geopolitical awareness (18).

Over the past decade cosmopolitanism has attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers, anthropologists, cultural critics, and political scientists, and Walkowitz's stimulating introduction takes on much of this rapidly growing and highly sophisticated body of work. Reasons for the explosion of interest in the aesthetic, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism are not hard to find. The acceleration of globalization, the Balkanization of world politics, genocide in Africa and Europe, wars in the Persian Gulf, and the perception that we are living through an unprecedented period of rapid transition have helped foster a need for cosmopolitan perspectives, for ways to think beyond national borders that might permit an ethically responsible, politically engaged, and, ideally, liveable relation to the world. Hence the recent portmanteau, "glocalization," imported into English from the Japanese business world in 1995 by Roland Robertson.¹ For cultural and literary critics, "cosmopolitanism" is useful not only as a nodal point for interdisciplinary work but also, particularly in Cosmopolitan Style, as a means of reasserting the value of aesthetic culture at a time when modernity increasingly assigns value elsewhere.

If the earliest antecedent for Walkowitz's particular notion of cosmopolitanism is James Clifford's concept of "discrepant cosmopolitanism" in his 1992 essay "Traveling Cultures," she builds also on more recent work by, among others, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Amanda Anderson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruce Robbins, and Walter Mignolo, all of whose work she analyzes with great insight and critical intelligence as she meticulously formulates an understanding of cosmopolitanism more closely attuned to the idiosyncratic style of modernist thinking and form than has hitherto been the case.² Hence the weight of the second term in Walkowitz's title: "style" here refers not only to literary style but to postures, attitudes, modes of being in the world; it therefore mediates between literary studies and other disciplines, such as sociology, history, and media studies. More important, "style" shifts to the foreground the kind of affective states and micropolitical gestures in which modernism tends to specialize. The "cosmopolitan style" of modernist literature, Walkowitz argues, catches fine-grained aspects of global...