Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community
Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.
Although James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein develop radically different models for social organization, their narratives consistently place the notion of community at their core. Their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, especially in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. (3)
While these writers were not all radical or even progressive, especially in their real-world politics, the writings of James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. (3)
The notion of cosmopolitanism as a function or outgrowth of a radical deconstructive community loads distinctly different from traditional Kantian versions. Martha Nussbaum’s revised Kantian cosmopolitanism is important in that, as will this book, it recognizes the ethical and political claims of literature as formative of and inseparable from real world relations. Nussbaum places human identity within a series of concentric circles, beginning from self, then moving out through family to neighbors, local groups, fellow countrymen--to which she adds the categories of “ethnic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender, or sexual identities” -- and finally humanity as a whole. Thus we are both local and universal at once. (16)
If as Bruce Robbins contends, “instead of an ideal of detachment, actually existing cosmopolitanism is a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance,” then the communities commanding such attachment may be describes as cosmopolitan communities. (16)
Drusilla Cornell has recently approached this problem by appealing to the process of translation--that very process evoked by Benjamin in “The Storyteller”--in order to re-cast what she calls “the moral reminder of the universe”;
The task that cultural difference sets for us is in the articulation of universality through a difficult labor of translation; the terms made to stand for one another are transformed in the process and the movement of that unanticipated transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be achieved and which, in order to resist domestication, may never be fully or finally achievable.” (24)
[Henry] James’ cosmopolitanism, this chapter will argue, arises from a complex interplay of ideas about community and cosmopolitanism which are in circulation both in Europe and the United States from the 1890s through the first years of the twentieth century. The late battle over the meaning and possibility of cosmopolitanism, which hinges, particularly in the United States, on the insistently paradoxical relationship among cosmopolitanism, nativism, and notions of the ideal woman. (32)
The term “cosmopolitan” becomes almost exclusively pejorative in British usage in the first half of the nineteenth century and almost always opposed to national identity and local community...In British usage the definition becomes pejorative precisely at the time that the conception of the modern nation-state is becoming increasingly dominant. (35)
While Cosmopolitan’s masthead invokes the claim that the “world is my country” the articles that follow make it clear that one is not meant thereby to question one’s American loyalty or citizenship. The use here is figurative or cultural, and not specifically political.
Nor do we encounter elsewhere even the derogatory use, common in Great Britain at the time, or “cosmopolitan vagrancy,” applied in the realm of cultural identity. American popular use of the term in this period is almost exclusively positive, practical, and seemingly unthreatening to the expanding national consciousness. (37)