Jessica Berman is associate professor and chair of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community and the coeditor, with Jane Goldman, of Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds, a collection of papers from the tenth annual conference on Virginia Woolf. With Paul Saint-Amour, she is coeditor of Columbia University Press's series Modernist Latitudes.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Imagining JusticePart 11. Intimate and Global: Ethical Domains from Woolf to Rhys2. Comparative Colonialisms: JoycePart 23. Modernism in the Zenana: The Domestic Spaces of Sorabji4. Commitment and the Scene of War: Max Aub and Spanish Civil War Writing5. Arising from the Cornlands: The Working-Class Voices of Conroy and Le SueurAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex