Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism by Jessica Berman (review)

In 2004 when "Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf" appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, the article altered and expanded my understanding of Woolf 's writing and enhanced my approach to teaching her works. I have since followed Jessica Berman's presentations at conferences with increasingly high expectations and awaited the publication of this book with eagerness. The book itself exceeds my expectations. It will be the title I name—reluctant to pass along my own copy perhaps—to advanced students and curious colleagues investigating the links between ethics and politics or seeking an invigorated, transnational understanding of modernism.

Jessica Berman presents here a new approach to comparative literary studies that considers transnational difference within imperial languages like English and Spanish, but beyond the European or U.S. metropolis where comparative literature has traditionally staked its claims. This book allows us to understand the early twentieth century's literary legacy across nations as it is carefully theorized and here investigated in "the living archive of intercultural literary history," to quote Jed Esty's succinct description on the book's back cover. While Berman convincingly expands global modernism's reach, she maintains traditional definitions based on time (beginning with the turn into the twentieth century and ending with the Second World War) and stylistic or formal experimentation. At the same time, the field is newly enriched by her understanding of modernism's grounding ethical commitments and political engagement. Modernist narrative, she argues, is an ethical engagement with the demands of modernity. Narrative allows us to traverse the variant paths between "ought" and "is," from the politics of the actual through ethical commitments to a vision of practicable global justice. The book opens by claiming: "Narrative is the mode in which we, as individuals and collectives, account for ourselves"; it arises "in conjunction with particular rhetorical situations or exigencies that call forth its action in the world" (5). Throughout, in a broadly ranging series of examples, the book compellingly presents narrative as the site of experimentation where aesthetics and epistemology meet the social world. A surprising conclusion meditates on the role of narrative in Barack Obama's Nobel acceptance speech to conclude that his narratives represent broader impulses to "create 'as if ' realms that not only respond to the exigence of their rhetorical situations but also carry implications for action in the world and for the establishment of real- world justice within the domain of politics" (284). Berman's book travels a transnational course through which such texts move from intimate ethics to global politics without ever diminishing either the intimate or the ethical but recognizing their conjunction as the only substrate on which global justice can be built.

Even summarizing this book's scope is daunting: Mulk Raj Anand's novels move into position as a "constitutive part of modernism" allowing readers to envision James Joyce's more canonical colonial writing in a new light. Jean Rhys's voice is located here as much in a Creole Caribbean as in a metropolitan Europe, underscoring one of the questions Berman maintains as crucial to modernist narrative politics: "Who speaks, and from what location?" (283). The recent scholarly emphasis on the modernist domestic is invigorated with consideration of the hybridgenre Indian zenana texts. While recognizing the contributions of Hemingway, Orwell, and Woolf (in Three Guineas) to the literary heritage of the Spanish Civil War, Berman guides our attention to Spanish- language fiction stubbornly excluded from the canons of this period; she compellingly explicates the foundational work of Max Aub alongside propaganda produced on all sides of the conflict. Setting aside established platitudes about the conventional stylistic tendency of committed political writing in the 1930's, she situates working class literature in the U.S. in a crucial place within the modernist stylistic experiment and between ethical and aesthetic commitments. The expansive understanding Modernist Commitments provides opens not only the geographic borders of the field, but enhances our understanding of its proper critical practices, engagements, and politics.

Within this sweep there...