Comparative Literature Studies

Posnock, Ross.
Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review)
Comparative Literature Studies - Volume 44, Number 3, 2007, pp. 393-395

Penn State University Press

Ross Posnock - Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review) - Comparative Literature Studies 44:3 Comparative Literature Studies 44.3 (2007) 393-395 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Ross Posnock Columbia University Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. By Rebecca L. Walkowitz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 248 pp. $29.50. Although the last decade has witnessed a great revival of interest in the term "cosmopolitan" as a possible successor to an exhausted multiculturalism and its reliance on identity, the term still carries a good deal of baggage, above all, its connotations of elitism, even decadence. In this shrewdly conceived, well-informed, and well-executed study, Rebecca Walkowitz meets this challenge head-on: she manages to give aesthetic weight to the cosmopolitan as a style, tactic, and posture of irreverence and "perversity" that ruptures good...