An interview with Rebecca L. Walkowitz

nnIn Cosmopolitan Style,Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that modernist literary style has been crucial to new ways of thinking and acting beyond the nation.nnnQ: What is cosmopolitanism?nnRebecca Walkowitz: Well, first of all, it’s important to know that there are several strands of cosmopolitanism. Today, we tend to think of cosmopolitanism as an ethical paradigm that involves an obligation to people who live beyond one’s national community. However, because this obligation depends on a consciousness of belonging that is transnational or global, cosmopolitanism has also been a cultural paradigm that values contact with strangers and their ways of life. In addition, cosmopolitanism often involves the testing of local customs, so it has tended to value individualism, artistic experimentation, social deviance, and urban mobility. My book argues that the ethical paradigm of cosmopolitanism is inseparable from its cultural and aesthetic dimensions. We can see these strands of cosmopolitanism come together in the work of the twentieth-century writers I discuss in this study: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald.nnQ: But why literary modernism? What does the modernist novel have to do with the political urgencies of cosmopolitanism?nnRW: Some contemporary theorists of cosmopolitanism have been reluctant to associate the ethical project of cosmopolitanism, which focuses on problems of exploitation and inequality in the world, with modernism, which they argue emphasizes rarified, often frivolous experiences. But this reluctance is misplaced in two ways. The idiosyncratic vision of modernism is congruent to and necessary for cosmopolitanism’s effort to compare, distinguish, and judge different versions of transnational thought. Moreover, the thoroughly international context of national traditions is a central concern of modernist writers, whose work often serves to display the relationship between everyday, local activities and exceptional, global ones. The writers I consider in this book show that conditions of national and international affiliation depend on narrative patterns of attentiveness, relevance, perception, and recognition. For them, cosmopolitanism is a matter of style.nnQ: Why do cosmopolitan attitudes take such negative forms? Why are cosmopolitan styles such as evasion, treason, and vertigo important in your book?nnRW: Modernist writers test and transform the relationship between political critique and literary style. For example, in her fiction Virginia Woolf examines literary classifications that many of her readers take for granted. In particular, she is interested in what counts as argument and what it means to be attentive to the suffering of others. Some of her early readers said that her novels are evasive, but she notices that those who identify evasiveness in others assume some agreement about the topics that deserve attention and the kinds of attentiveness that are attentive enough. Woolf suggests that sometimes evading one kind of attentiveness—looking at the same thing all of the time, for example—is a way to articulate a new kind that involves a more comparative, more agitated style of thought. Writers such as Woolf and others I consider in my book are trying to challenge our sense of what constitutes critical thinking, and they suggest that sometimes thinking critically involves the suspension of agency and dedicated thought.nnQ: Why include W. G. Sebald, who wrote his novels in German, in a book about the British novel?nnRW: Sebald, who died in a car accident in 2001, lived in England for the last thirty years of his life. His novels and works of nonfiction animate problems of national classification in general and the problem of his own national classification in particular. Many of his books are concerned with what it means for a person or a novel to “pass” for British, or for any nationality. His third novel, The Rings of Saturn, is especially concerned with this question. He also thinks about how other British and Irish writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, approached this question in the past.nnQ: Why bring early-twentieth-century writers together with late-twentieth-century writers? What does Kazuo Ishiguro tell us, for example, about Virginia Woolf?nnRW: The strand of cosmopolitanism that involved aestheticism, dandyism, and flanerie at the end of the nineteenth century helped to establish a new analysis of perception and alternative modes of political consciousness among early modernist writers. Being aware of these alternative modes helps us to see that Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were more engaged in cosmopolitan thinking than we may have previously realized, and it helps us to see the importance of modernism and its cosmopolitan attitudes in the work of postcolonial writers at the end of the twentieth century.nn