Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (review)

Reviews 139 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1991. Pp. xviii + 207. $39.95 cloth; $14.95 paperback. In August 1993, the long-standing attempt to form a European Union seemed ready to collapse when the Exchange Rate Mechanism was unable to stabilize the currencies of the various member nations against the pressures of historic competition. Despite issues of refugee/immigration control, despite the Social Charter and its provisions for labor and women, despite a common defense policy, and despite specific dissensions raised by popular referendums in the small, peripheral nations of Denmark and Ireland, it was currency that ultimately offered the central challenge to European consolidation. Yet the center does continue to hold. The union persists precariously, notwithstanding the prescriptions of W. B. Yeats (canonized poet of that peripheral member, Ireland) and even, so the argument goes, notwithstanding the cultural, economic , and political interests of the more outlying signatories of the Maastricht Treaty. Indeed, Gregory Jusdanis's Befated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture can be read as the literary history of the development of such an argument. Jusdanis stresses the importance of peripheral spaces—in this case Greece—in defining, redefining, constituting, and critiquing the political projections of a dominant nationalist core such as Europe, whether that core be the various nations considered separately or the European Union considered as a whole. Basic to Jusdanis's position is the thesis that culture—and especially literature—is decisive in establishing and reproducing a national identity and in maintaining a nation's consensus regarding that identity. The formulation "belated modernity," furthermore, offers not only a geopolitical argument but also a historical analysis that, when the two are considered together, challenges both the "Eurocentrism and the chronocentrism in modernization theories" (xiii). The "Greek case," claims Jusdanis, "indicates that the dichotomous thinking underlying the whole argument for Third World modernization has been present right from the beginning" (xiv); thus the "aestheticization " of culture is part of "purposeful modernization," which in turn is a reaction against the sense of "belatedness" and, moreover, is evidence for the persuasive pressure of European models of both the literary and the socioeconomic type. Rather than perpetuating the inevitable temporal discrepancies involved in modernization, however, Jusdanis argues that we need to formulate "alternative theories within the boundaries of a reclaimed symbolic space" (xvi). As Jusdanis points out, Greece is the only Balkan nation that belongs to both NATO and the EU. But he treats Greece's process of European identification—a process involving both the European view of Greece as the source of its own civilization and Greece's view of itself as European—in a way that challenges the very premises behind that process. His argument, developed over five chapters, proceeds according to what Edward W. Said in Culture and ImperiaUsm (New York: Knopf, 1993) terms a contrapuntal methodology . This contrasts the development of nationhood in Europe to the belated, even reactive, emergence of nationhood in Greece. However, in both 140 Reviews cases, i.e., in both the core and the periphery, Jusdanis sees as central to the nationalizing agenda the institutionalization and criticism of literature. His first chapter, "Criticism as National Culture," builds on Comparative Literature as precisely that "discipline concerned with the literary traditions of the 'nation' of Europe" (2); the chapter proceeds to articulate the political reciprocity between U. S. academic structures and global geographies. Chapter 2, "From Europe to Nation-State," using world-systems theory, goes on to examine Greek expectations as the Ottoman Empire dissolved and possibilities for realignment emerged, a situation that created the "tilt toward Europe" but that also generated both the internal conflict pitting demotic against katharévusa and the need to form a canon. Chapter 3, under the same name, examines the development of canonicity beginning with the classical κανών of the fifth century B.C. as a rule for excellence, proceeding to the Hellenistic age when the canon already hearkened back to previously consecrated predecessors as the "best" or as representative of a given style, moving thence to the Bible as canonical, then onward to the making of literary canons by, for example, anthologizing exemplary works, and finally to the γλωσσικό ζήτημα. This...