"Introduction"
from Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation
(Columbia University Press, 2006)
by Rebecca L. Walkowitz
I found Walkowitz's overview of traditional and divergent modes of reading international modernism very helpful. I had not thought a lot about cosmopolianism so this was a good introduction for me. Walkowitz defines critical cosmopolitanism as "a type of international engagement that can be distinguished from 'planetary humanism' by two principal characteristics: an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen" (2).
Interestingly, even though my Honours work focuses on early modernism (Imagism, of all things), I'm finding a lot of the articles we've been reading eye-opening because of the focus on "the concept of style more broadly conceived - as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness - is crucial to many of the other, nonliterary practices of cosmopolitanism whose study has transformed disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, transnational cultural studies, and media studies" (2). Modernism was not traditionally looked at in these terms (due largely to New Criticism), but I believe the influence of postcolonial studies and other related fields has forced modernist critics to re-read more "socio-critically." Walkowitz states this explicitly, saying that Cosmopolitan Style "diverges from traditional accounts of international modernism by treating literary style politically" (6). I would love to have had this at my disposal at the beginning of my Honours work because of her methodology and way of re-defining terms.