“SOLEMN PROGRESS”: MODERNISM, SOCIAL CONSTITUTION, AND COSMIC LIFE
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Date
2014-08-25
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation examines how modernist writers engaged with various forms of civic virtue even as they considered how still broader affective investments might sustain a common humanity. Employing a method similar to what Susan Stanford Friedman has termed “cultural parataxis” (the use of global juxtapositions to highlight cross-cultural ramifications of modernist texts), it illuminates affinities and divergences in works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lin Yutang, and Rabindranath Tagore to uncover a shared attentiveness, on the part of writers in the East and the West, to the implications of collective modes of feeling for public life. Though writing from different sides of the colonial divide, the authors under discussion remained similarly vigilant about the ways in which patriotic sentiments could be marshaled for militant and self-interested purposes in the name of civic virtue. Instead of negating the significance of civic engagement, however, they sought to create alternative understandings of collective spirit that they believed would be nourishing for modern life.
I argue that the re-imaginings of solidarity in these writers’ works involve two moves that are temporally divergent yet temperamentally complementary: a renewal of attention to older conceptions of civil society whose ethic was civilized rather than narrowly civic; and an extension of the domain of society to a cosmic realm of life beyond the purview of the political state. Focusing on the relation between shared cosmopolitan sensibilities and various imaginings of the cosmic in modernist literature across cultural boundaries, the project sheds light on aspects of collective experience that are structured (but not completely circumscribed) by economic models of globalization and opens up new avenues for thinking about the scope, content, and applicability of cosmopolitanism. Its ethico-aesthetically attuned approach, while attending to cultural particularities captured by these literary works, establishes deeper affinities between intellectual traditions in the East and the West.
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modernism, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lin Yutang, Rabindranath Tagore, cosmopolitanism, civility, cosmic imaginings, solemnity, collective spirit