Two Cheers for Cosmopolitanism

ELT 46 : 1 2003 Jane, the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Parkin, the gamekeeper , rejects Bertha for the same reason and never is able to have sexual connection with women. By the final version of the novel, all trace of that dysfunction evaporates, just as Lawrence tries to reject all other Ruskinian influences. Ruskin's use of language and its effect on Joyce is the subject of Toni Cerutti's essay, the one most concerned with contemporary literary theory. Although Joyce was bred on Ruskin and admired him greatly in his youth, "youthful admiration shifted into ironic disparagement ." This is the only article to concentrate fully on Ruskin's writing , so often neglected in the rush to consider the importance of Ruskin's ideas. Cerutti points out the modernity of Ruskin's seemingly fusty interest in philology: as with Joyce and later with deconstructionists, "reconstructing the origin of a word meant recovering a wider semantic field than the one usually denoted by a single item." Ruskin and Modernism participates in a renewed interest in Ruskin's effect on modernism. It is the latest and most wide-ranging of several recent essay collections on the subject, including most notably Birch's Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999) and Cerutti's Ruskin and the Twentieth Century (2000). This surge of scholarship on Ruskin suggests that the time has come for book-length studies of Ruskin's impact on the modern period—and beyond. The individual essays in this volume considering specific authors reveal a pattern of influence worth exploring in far more breadth and depth. I hope that this book and the others mentioned will spur the work of scholars and critics who will synthesize these vital but atomized essays, then move past them to more intensive, integrated, and comprehensive studies of Ruskin's importance for modernism—and for postmodernism as well. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman ______________ Louisiana State University Two Cheers for Cosmopolitanism Jessica Berman. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. χ + 202 pp. $59.95 JESSICA BERMAN'S new book invites a broad theoretical background . For the past few years an extended rereading of modernism has burst forth in a number of books, animated by issues ranging from gender or race to postmodernism. On the basis of the first two of these, new candidates (Mina Loy, Zora Neale Hurston) are being urged into an expanded version of the canon. On the basis of the last, a new period term, 78 BOOK REVIEWS "late modernism," has come into existence, and the great modernists (now including Wyndham Lewis) emerge looking more distant, desperate , or else just disparate than they once did. In any case, no longer are Eliot, Pound or Joyce seen as paring their respective fingernails while striving to remain aloof from popular culture or commercial concerns. More to Berman's purpose, no longer can James or Woolf be read as spinning out reams of mannered, self-absorbed prose while eschewing involvement not only in political issues (this emphasis no longer surprises) but in fundamental questions about the construction of society and even the idea of a nation. What the critic means by "cosmopolitanism " may be elusive. But this is a most sophisticated and stimulating book, inspired by postcolonial inquiries into nationality and various political theories about the narrative construction of community . What Berman wants to do, most simply, is to urge the study of modernist fiction as providing "alternative models" of community. Four writers are considered in four chapters: James, Proust, Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Each is treated in the same way: at the outset of each chapter, a historical field of some sort is proposed, and then relevant texts of each writer are read in terms of the specific questions of nationality, gender, and politics given by (or embedded in) the field. For Proust, this means the radical Zionist thought of Bernard Lazare, which excitingly contextualizes the fascination with the figures of the parvenu and the pariah everywhere evident in A la recherche. For Stein, the field is provided by American cultural geography at the turn of the century, which provocatively grounds (pun intended) a topographical construction of identity...