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Rebecca Walkowitz. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. xiii + 231 pp.
In this creative and engaging study, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues persuasively for a new understanding of the relationship between the ethics and aesthetics of cosmopolitanism and the literary practices of British modernism. At its core, Cosmopolitan Style is a refreshing treatment of three familiar British modernists-Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf-alongside three contemporary (post-1980s) writers-Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald. These cosmopolitan writers are linked by more than sensibilities, postures, travels, or states of exile, Walkowitz argues; for each of them, she identifies a unique, affective style of critique, which she coins Conrad's "naturalness," Joyce's "triviality," Woolf's "evasion," Ishiguro's "treason," Rushdie's "mix-up," and Sebald's "vertigo." Through these literary-critical devices, she demonstrates, the six novelists "develop and examine new attitudes of cosmopolitanism" (4) with a "suspicion of epistemological privilege" (2) and a "new distrust of civilizing processes, and of the role of art in these processes" (4). Walkowitz characterizes these interventions as instances of critical cosmopolitanism that seek both to redress (through innovative narrative forms) the past abuses of cosmopolitanism (its complicity with imperialism or its irresponsible decadence) and to take an irreverent metacritical approach to imperatives of clarity and utility, whether in critical theory or in political discourse (2). Informed by Adorno and de Certeau, Walkowitz thus grounds her readings of modernism and cosmopolitanism in her conception of these authors' signature techniques as model strategies of institutional, normative, and cultural critique. She elucidates the tensions and contradictions they encountered when negotiating art and politics, the local and the global, and projects of democratic individualism and social collectivism in a manner that allows salient literary and historical questions to animate her study in rewarding ways.
Walkowitz joins the wide-ranging and lively conversation on cosmopolitanism that James Clifford, Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Walter Mignolo, Amanda Anderson, Carol Breckenridge, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, and many others have sustained in past two decades. Her key contribution is to reclaim literary affect-specifically, "style," a term she enriches to frame the...