Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (review)

In Cosmodernism, Christian Moraru constructs a persuasive account of the American novel in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Building upon recent scholarship on cosmopolitanism and globalization, Moraru argues that in our contemporary moment, the American novel is no longer "American" in any coherent fashion. Rather, Moraru proposes that in the novels of our recent past and present, there develops a new paradigm—what he refers to as "cosmodernism"—wherein literary texts represent globalization's erosion of national boundaries, articulate a strongly relational ethics, and often critique globalization's homogenizing effects on culture.

Cosmodernism is a broad, periodizing study, and for Moraru, the term "cosmodernism" invokes but differs from both modernism and postmodernism. Moreover, the concept demarcates the ways in which, "more than at any point in our past, being-in-relation, with an other, makes for the cornerstone of America and its self-perception in literature, art, and the humanities" (2). This "cosmodern turn" occurs in "post-1989 American letters," and cosmodernism manifests itself multiply, as "an imaginary modality," "a protocol of subjectivity formation," "an ethical imperative," and "a critical algorithm" (2, 7, 4, 5). The concept of "cosmodernism" is useful for categorizing literary texts that foreground relational ethics, such as Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, one of the novels analyzed early on in the book. More broadly, "cosmodernism" also consolidates imperatives in aesthetics and criticism to de-center the self, embrace cosmopolitan ethics, and understand the world as a network. Moraru's book is ambitious in scope, yet his argument is carefully measured. While cosmodernism is "a new paradigm and epoch in American literature, theory, and culture," it is also closely aligned with modernist and postmodernist styles and bound to a long tradition of ethical and political thought that Moraru traces back to antiquity (314).

The book begins with a prologue and introductory chapter that lay the largely theoretical foundations for cosmodernism, which draw heavily from French theory and will be familiar to scholars interested in relational ethics and cosmopolitanism. The major thinkers that guide Moraru's development of cosmodernism—and, especially, its relational subjectivity and ethical imperative—are Derrida and Levinas, along with an impressive array of other philosophers ranging from Zeno of Citium to Charles Taylor. After developing the theoretical foundations of cosmodernism, the book moves on to five thematic parts, dealing with idiomatic language, names, translation, interpretation, and the body. Cosmodernism then concludes with a discussion of cosmodernism's relation to and departure from postmodernism. Each of these parts contains a theoretical consideration along with readings of literary texts, and like Moraru's theoretical range, his chosen literary texts are diverse examples of cosmodernism's explanatory power. The literary texts, mostly novels, that receive the most attention in Cosmodernism are Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Underworld, Raymond Federman's Return to Manure, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Chang-Rae Lee's Aloft, A Gesture Life, and Native Speaker, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Zadie Smith's Autograph Man, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. This list could be expanded, as Moraru often references other works to add context. The number of novels discussed in the book alone strengthens its case for the coherence of the cosmodern imaginary.

Relational ethics are central to Moraru's Cosmodernism, and the book can be read as an account of literature that has been rather explicitly influenced by French theory, especially deconstruction's language games and constitutive self-other relationship. Moraru explores the ways in which writers such as Federman, Lahiri, and Lee play with literary history and naming, and thus foreground language's role in constructing identity and its power to rewrite history in more expansive, cosmopolitan forms. His reading of Smith's The Autograph Man seizes upon the concept of the "translator as meaning-maker," invoking the structuralist and post-structuralist account of language's generative nature (165). Because of this focus on language's role in...