Modernist Commitments

Reviews / Votes

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