Title: Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism
Abstract: Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. Jessica Berman (NY: Columbia UP, 2011). x + 372 pp. In her earlier book, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), Jessica Berman critiqued a number of theorizations of community for their dependence upon a universalizable liberal subject, and drew on feminist theorists of to insist on specificity among the web of stories we call our selves (13). In this new work, she considers specific texts from a variety of to delineate an eclectic modernism, and also counters the notion that only realist writing can be politically engaged. Ranging from well-known texts by Joyce, Rhys, and Woolf, to works more recently familiar such Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Untouchable, well to obscure and difficult to access works by Indian women writers of the early twentieth century, Berman argues that they all can be seen examples of a practice of engagement with local political situations through the narrative creation of an as if' world of imagined possibility. Although Berman does not go far some in her expansion of modernist (not far, for example, Susan Stanford Friedman), choosing to confine her readings more or less to the common temporal parameters of the interwar period, she does posit a transnational optic through which texts of quite different kinds might be united through social and textual relationships under the term modernist. Casting so wide a net raises the question, for me, of whether thus establishing commonalities does not tend to flatten the world rather too much. If modernism's country is the whole world, whose is it? These are ethical questions that Berman's thoughtful book takes to heart, but by finding a similar politically engaged purpose of aesthetic experimentation in all the texts she considers, Berman's readings maintain a paradigmatic that can at times seem at odds with the effort to challenge the European and metropolitan bias of older definitions. It is eminently reasonable to say, Berman does in her chapter on Spanish Civil War texts, that if we restrict our gaze to a specific set of texts, formal attributes, or series of attitudes, we risk ignoring the various shapes and guises of it arises in response to aesthetic, social, historical, and rhetorical demands in a variety of locations (185-86), but when that expansive gaze finds almost everywhere it looks, its usefulness a definition is weakened. In pursuing her argument that modernism brings to the fore narrative's role in helping us imagine justice (7), Berman deploys philosopher Drucilla Cornell's concept of the imaginary domain, an intimate ethical space to which politics should be accountable. The Western liberal subject of the language of rights, for example, has been deeply problematic for those marginalized by its construction. Berman finds inherent in narrative the possibility of more just, more ethically responsive constructions. A theme of her book is that politically engaged writing does not necessarily have to eschew formal experimentation, a view that has made the 1930s seem anomalous in the history of modernism. She takes issue with critics who have read realist writers such Jack Conroy or Meridel Le Sueur, for example, and argues through close readings of Conroy's The Disinherited and Le Sueur's The Girl that their work is formally experimental in ways that intend to use aesthetic practices for political ends. Commitment that seems to take precedence over form remains a sort of marker for 'that-which-is-not-modernism' (27), she writes; she would like to bring such works into the fold. However, the identification of worldwide textual correspondences and intersections (30) among the social and political commitments of texts from very diverse can risk imposing a kind of formal homogeneity on these chosen examples. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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