Moraru's Cosmodernism

The critical discourse about postmodernism has recently taken a turn toward declarations that postmodernism is dead, finished, past. The aftermath of 9/11 and the trend of American fiction that is grounded in realism have prompted critics into a discussion about the post-postmodern moment that marks our existence.¹ Christian Moraru is deeply invested in this discussion; in his Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary, he offers a unique theoretical and ethical framework for analyzing literature created in the late 1990s, after the peak of postmodernism, and raises literary and ethical questions about our contemporary moment. Moraru introduces a term that inventively describes the scope, ambition, and breadth of this period and its cultural practices: cosmodernism.

Cosmodernism is, according to Moraru, a paradigm that is typical of the period after 1989 and whose main characteristic is relationality, or what he calls "being-in-relation, with an other" (2). Such relationality is manifested in American fictional narratives as an identity that is always created in relation to a wider context, surpassing the geopolitical and cultural limits of the U.S. Moraru thus sees cosmodernism as a "rationale and vehicle for a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious and other boundaries" (5). Drawing on Levinasian ethics, he argues that cosmodernism's ethical imperative and its novelty aim to bring us all together. This ethical investment is the main disparity between postmodernism and cosmodernism, and Moraru implicitly draws on the criticism of postmodernism as a socially disengaged practice, although he does not voice that stance in his text.² Cosmodernism moreover 1) displaces our ignorance "toward returning the 'I' to its intellectual and moral dignity by allowing him or her to see things usually hiding in the shadow of his or her egocentrism" (75); 2) makes it possible to develop relationships in difference that Levinas introduced in his writing; and 3) introduces a "historicized argument for a cosmodern ethics" by reading the works of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century as a "drama of with-ness" (75).³ The main characteristic of cosmodernism is, in other words, its interest in a humanity conditioned by diverse political, social, and cultural elements. Moraru explores this interest mainly by way of its linguistic performance.

In the first part of the study, "Idiomatics," Moraru examines the way that American cosmoderns treat language, recognizing in this treatment the foundation of an approach to ethics and, therefore, his own cosmodern theory as well. He recognizes a shift from a cosmopolitan view of linguistic globalism toward a multilingual, plurivocal mode. While the cosmopolitan approach was universalist, the cosmodern is idiomatic: "the cosmodern self makes itself, linguistically and otherwise, as it opens itself to the post-1989 Babel; thus, whatever this self speaks about, it speaks in tongues" (9). Using Jacques Derrida's understanding of linguistic skills and Doris Summer's critique of Derrida's concepts, Moraru argues that the linguistic and national identities of this period are formulated in language "outside the stricture of . . . equivalence" (80). Americanness, for instance, fluctuates and depends on linguistic performance; linguistic and national identities are performed and created in relation to the totality of exposure to other linguistic and national identities. The American nation and native speakers are not the only measure of linguistic nationality and fluency, but rather participate in the performative act of creating "nation," "language," "American," "American English," and "native." To illustrate this point, Moraru analyses Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, claiming that Lee "pins his hopes on the linguistic jumble itself. Set against monoglossic cosmopolitanism, his polyglossic cosmodernism . . . values . . . people's rights not just to idioms not theirs by birth but also to idiomatic uses of these idioms" (102). In Lee's novel, which has been celebrated for its linguistic and multicultural optimism, Moraru sees an example of the new, celebratory national and linguistic performativity that versifies and diversifies America. With their "'Babelized' English," Moraru suggests, Lee's characters acquire a...