Modernism has long been characterized as more concerned with aesthetics than politics, but Jessica Berman argues that modernist narrative bridges the gap between ethics and politics, connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities-ideas about what we ought to be and do-to active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges the divisions usually drawn between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation. Berman also makes the case for an expanded transnational model of modernism. Arguing that modernism may be best seen as a dynamic set of relationships, problematics, and cultural responses to modernity rather than a static canon of works, a given set of formal devices, or a specific range of attitudes, Berman jettisons the notion that modernism originates in a few key European texts or arrives only belatedly in other regions. Examining work from the metropolitan centers of Europe, late-colonial India, revolutionary Spain, and the proletarian communities of the American Midwest, Modernist Commitments compares narratives from the centers and the margins of power, looking at resistance to colonialism and matters of class and gender as the subject matter of modernism. Through close readings of authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mulk Raj Anand, Max Aub, and Meridel Le Sueur, Berman shows how modernism's play with formal matters, its challenge to the boundaries between fact and fiction, its incorporation of vernacular and folkways, and its engagement with embodied experience and intimacy offer not only an expanded account of modernist texts and commitments but a new way of thinking about what modernism is and can do.
Industry Reviews
Vigorously expanding the scope of modernist and postcolonial fiction studies, Modernist Commitments ranges boldly from early-twentieth-century India to Civil War Spain and Depression-era U.S. corn lands, encompassing not only writers such as Woolf, Rhys, Joyce, and Anand but also little-known authors of domestic, postcolonial, wartime, and working-class narratives. In her multifaceted, engaging, and richly researched book, Berman spans the archival and the philosophical, advances the transnationalization of modernist studies, and powerfully reveals the ethical and political urgencies embedded in modernist narrative technique. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics Modernist Commitments is a rigorously philosophical and comparative contribution to transnational modernist studies. It juxtaposes locations of modernity seldom conjoined-e.g., colonial India, Civil War Spain, and the rural United States, along with London and Dublin-and is particularly valuable for its exploration of narrative as a form of political intervention into the public spheres of war and colonialism and the private intimacies of the domestic. A must-read for the new modernist studies. -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison Modernist Commitments is the book to read if you want to know what transnational criticism in twentieth-century literature can achieve once we stop theorizing the global and start investigating the living archive of intercultural literary history. Berman boldly redefines the question of global modernism by zeroing in on the shared ethical dimensions of disparate modernisms. A superb, sure-footed guide to the complex relation between narrative ethics and literary politics. Berman utterly and finally debunks the myths of modernist disengagement and aesthetic individualism. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development Well researched and clearly written... A noteworthy contribution to its field. Choice Readers will emerge from these ambitious encounters with a profound appreciation for Berman's patient erudition, fluid critical voice, and beautifully structured analyses. -- Jeanette McVicker Virginia Woolf Miscellany An important contribution that graciously integrates politics and ethics into a comparative study of transnational modernism while providing new directions for future work in postcolonial and global studies. -- Juan Meneses Modern Fiction Studies Remarkable -- Hugues Azerad Modern Language Review
