Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

1. Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” awards are limited to writers under forty who are citizens of the United Kingdom, though the winners need not be residents; one of the 2003 winners lives permanently in the United States, while another was born and in part raised in Pakistan; see Ian Jack, “Introduction,” Granta 81 (Spring 2003): 10. The Whitbread Award for “contemporary British writing” does not require citizenship in the United Kingdom but does require at least three years residency. The Man-Booker Prize is awarded for the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. In May 2002, the sponsors of the Booker proposed that novels written in English by U.S. citizens also should be considered, but this proposal was later retracted to protect what Lisa Jardine, a Booker judge and professor of English, called the “voice of the Commonwealth.” Robert McCrum, “The World of Books: Parochial, Smug, Ill-Informed. And That’s Just the Critics,” The Observer, 26 May 2002, 18.

2. Austerlitz was published almost simultaneously in German (Munich, March 2001) and in English (New York and London, October 2001); Sebald’s other books were published first in German and only later in English.

3. For an account of modernist literary styles used to articulate a fascist politics, see Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21, 139.

4. For a more modest or “strategic” type of “planetary humanism,” see Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 356. Gilroy’s project sounds more like critical cosmopolitanism when, in his more recent work, he distinguishes between a planetary humanism based on “mundane encounters with difference” and “recipes for good governance that have been pronounced from up above.” Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), 75. For other versions of “cosmopolitan universalism,” see Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press University Press, 1998), 21; and Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism?” in Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2.

5. Edward W. Said, “Heroism and Humanism,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 463 (6–12 January 2000), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/463/op10.htm; Jacques Lezra, “Unrelated Passions,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 83–84; Benjamin Lee, “Critical Internationalism,” Public Culture 7, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 591; Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 546.

6. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56.

7. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question,” 54–60; “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49; and “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 108, emphasis in original.

8. I’m thinking here of Bruce Robbins’s “cosmopolitics,” of Melba Cuddy-Keane’s “critical globalization,” of James Clifford’s “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” and of Homi K. Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” as well as of Walter Mignolo’s own “critical cosmopolitanism.” Below, I discuss these formulations in greater detail.

9. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 188–243. For recent efforts to historicize and offer alternatives to the contemporary norms of “critical reading,” see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel-Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37; Jordana Rosenberg, “The Bosom of the Bourgeoisie: Edgeworth’s Belinda,” ELH 70 (2003): 575–96; and Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13–38.

10. Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 17. For an analysis of these efforts to replace reason with ethos, see Amanda Anderson, “Argument and Ethos” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 103–34.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 284, 287. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michele Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 24, 27.

12. Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 17; Rosenberg, “Bosom of the Bourgeoisie,” 592. Also, see Sharon Marcus’s discussion of sentimentality in “Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, Universalism and Pathos,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 92.

13. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5.

14. For an extended discussion of cosmopolitanism’s negotiation between distance and proximity, see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). I am grateful to Sianne Ngai for helping me to think about “suspended agency” as a condition of postmodernity (Ugly Feelings, 32).

15. Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 170–74.

16. Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitianism, ed. Breckenridge et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3.

17. It is important to see that the opposite of “critical cosmopolitanism” is not really “uncritical cosmopolitanism,” since even a cosmopolitanism that does not reflect on its historical uses or on the varieties of critique will still involve the effort to display and often to judge economic patterns, systems of exploitation, and political responsibilities that were not previously visible. For this reason, I will refer, after Horkheimer, to “traditional cosmopolitanism.”

18. In formal terms, scholars have disagreed about which literary techniques are sufficient or necessary to properly modernist texts. For a helpful discussion of this disagreement, see Brian Richardson, “Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction,” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 291–309. I share Richardson’s sense that “modernist” writing can be identified in the early as well as the late twentieth century. However, I will not be attempting to choose among competing definitions of modernist form. Instead, I will be base my use of the term “modernist” on two assumptions: (1) that texts may include both modernist and postmodernist elements; and (2) that a more capacious definition of literary modernism allows us to notice contradictory impulses within responses to modernity and globalization.

19. The question of whether an “English literary history” (defined by language and subject matter) or a history of “British literature” (defined by sites of production) is more attentive to the experience of minority cultures, the history of colonialism, the variety of spoken or written languages used in Britain, and the history of writing and reading in English deserves much more attention than I will give it here. For a defense of “English literary history,” see Jonathan Bate, general preface to The Oxford English Literary History, in The Internationalization of English Literature, vol. 13, ed. Bruce King, in The Oxford Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), viii–x. For a defense of a history of “British literature,” see David Damrosch, preface to The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Longman, 1999), xxxiii–xxxvii.

20. For the relationship between “the personal” and “the international,” see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 196–97; Bruce Robbins cites Enloe in Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 172.

21. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 13–14.

22. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 39, 42.

23. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (September 2001): 505; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 181, 187.

24. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés (New York: Schocken, 1970); George Steiner, Extra-Territorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 102. For an effort to shift the metaphor from “exile” to “diaspora,” see Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).

25. For important accounts of the expansion and centrality of place in twentieth-century British fiction, see Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). For more recent work on this subject, see Bruce King, ed., The Internationalization of English Literature, vol. 13 of The Oxford Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John Clement Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

26. In recent years, scholars have sought to diversify modernism’s internationalism. Edward Said and Simon Gikandi have argued that the intellectual and economic movement between metropolitan centers in Europe and the United States and the centers of empire in India, East Asia, and Africa was crucial to the modernist imagination. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994); and Gikandi, Maps of Englishness. Earlier accounts of internationalism have been supplemented as well by a move toward greater specificity and plurality in the definition of the term: scholars now acknowledge the very different internationalisms, both biographical and literary, of T. S. Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and others. See Alex Zwerdling’s discussion of Eliot and James in Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates in London (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

27. Michael H. Levenson, “Does The Waste Land Have a Politics?” Modernism/ Modernity 6, no. 3 (September 1999): 1–13.

28. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1925), in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1984), 150, 152; “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924) in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 94–119.

29. I take the phrase “inadequacy and indispensability” from Antoinette Burton’s discussion of the usefulness of “the nation” as a disciplinary paradigm in “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 1–26; she takes her use from Chakrabarty’s discussion of the Enlightenment in Provincializing Europe. My sense of the tension between expanding and disabling traditions has been enriched by these formulations.

30. Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 10.

31. For an example of universal cosmopolitanism, see Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism?” 4. For plural cosmopolitanisms, see Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 1–14. For a discussion of the popular tradition, see Mica Nava, “Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 1–2 (2002): 81–99.

32. See Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 268.

33. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 95.

34. Homi K. Bhabha, “Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 434; James Clifford, Routes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 31.

35. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction, Part 1: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 2; Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 617–39; Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism,” 268–69, 285; Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations (London: Verso, 1993), 181.

36. Matthew Arnold, for example, supports cosmopolitanism as a “commingling of cultures” (this is Amanda Anderson’s phrase) and as the transcendence of provinciality, rather than as a change in what culture means (Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 94).

37. To be sure, modernist writers were preoccupied with national traditions and public rituals in the troubled political and economic climate of the 1930s, as Esty shows, but I argue that the manners and rituals of English society were a principal subject for modernist writing in previous decades as well. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 40.

38. My argument about the critique of heroic nationalism in some modernist works has been enriched by Christopher Reed’s account of “housework” modernism in Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 5.

39. Jennifer Wicke has described the “socialist individualism” of Bloomsbury as “Wildeanism lived in a coterie fashion,” “a design for living” that the Bloomsberries would live and others could emulate: Jennifer Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets,” Novel 28, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 9. Similarly, in Bloomsbury Rooms, Reed argues that “Bloomsbury artists’ thirty-year project to make modern rooms to suit their ideals for modern life attests to the persistence within modernism of subcurrents associated with the suppressed categories … [of] decoration, leisure, pleasure, femininity, sensuality” (277).

40. Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Susan Stanford Friedman, “Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at ‘Home’—The Case of Virginia Woolf,” in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 107–31.

41. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 101.

42. For work on the gender of modernity, see Janet Wolff, “The Feminine in Modern Art: Benjamin, Simmel, and the Gender of Modernity,” Theory, Culture, and Society 17 (2000): 37; Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); on Woolf’s “alternative discourse of feminist action and power … which seeks to intervene directly in the political life of Britain,” see Berman, Modernist Fiction, 117.

43. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 2000), 234.

44. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.

45. Decadence is an affect of cosmopolitanism, but it is a product of cosmopolitanism as well: consider, for example, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, an Orientalist drama about perverse desire and embodied display, composed by an Irishman acting out French symbolism in imperial London. Judith R. Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 337–76. Arguing for “the utopian exemplarity of ‘excessive’ pleasure—including the pleasure of ‘excessive’ interpretation—in a cultural order intensively involved in the regulation and distribution of sufficient pleasure,” Joseph Litvak introduces sophistication’s decadence as a strategy of social critique. Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.

46. One thinks of the Auden generation, of the Beat poets, and of contemporary novelists such as Jeanette Winterson and Alan Hollinghurst, among others. This legacy is the subject of Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); its effects on the literature of the First World War is discussed by Samuel Hynes in A War legacy is the subject of Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley Head, 1990), 16–17.

47. Some of the recent scholarship on modernism has sought to remedy this absence: while Amanda Anderson has emphasized the “strongly individualist elements” within the tradition of cosmopolitanism, including the “appeal to self-cultivation” in Oscar Wilde’s work (The Powers of Distance, 31–32), Heather Love has argued that, “as a form of aesthetic and moral apostasy, modernism joins the image of revolt to the image of abject failure.” Heather K. Love, “Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 19–43. For a critique of the assumption that the heroic model of modernism is the general model and for an analysis of the military metaphor, see Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, 2, 11.

48. Mica Nava, “Cosmopolitan Modernity”; Monica L. Miller, “The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 179–205; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Amitava Kumar, Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (New York: Routledge, 2004).

49. Like Joyce, some scholars now affirm ambivalence and conflict as necessary, sometimes useful conditions of cosmopolitan thought. The advocates of this position include anthropologists and literary scholars, as well as political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe, who argues for a model of radical democracy “that recognizes us as divided subjects and does not dream of an impossible reconciliation.” Chantal Mouffe, “Which Ethics for Democracy1” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 94. Also see Robbins, Feeling Global, 4, 17; James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 368–69. See Enda Duffy’s discussion of the “aggressive” qualities of postcolonial flânerie in The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 63.

50. Vinay Dharwadker, introduction to Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dhardwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2.

51. Samuel Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” Utilitas 11, no. 3 (November 1999): 255–76.

52. Of course, some might say that Tagore is hardly a critic of Eurocentrism. For this argument, see my “Cosmopolitan Ethics” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 221–30. Amit Chaudhuri argues that “some Orientals (Tagore, say) both were and were not Orientalists”: Chaudhuri, “In the Waiting-Room of History,” London Review of Books, 24 June 2004, 5.

53. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism1” 8.

54. Eurocentrism aside, learning French and reading English poetry are valorized by the cosmopolitan character Nikhil not as strategies of “worldwide allegiance” (Nussbaum’s phrase) but as strategies of individualism. Chakrabarty has pointed to the complexity of Tagore’s status not only within nationalism but also within modernism (Provincializing Europe, 158–171).

55. These echoes of modernism in contemporary cosmopolitanism are faint in some accounts, particularly in Nussbaum’s, which explicitly rejects versions of cosmopolitanism not committed to direct ethical action, but they are more distinct in those accounts that are committed to what I am calling “critical cosmopolitanism.” See Chakrabarty’s critique of the “waiting-room” theory of modernization in Provincializing Europe, 6–8 and passim.

56. Robbins, Feeling Global, 15.

57. This term was used as the title of a collection of essays edited by Robbins and Pheng Cheah in 1998. In “The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15–32, published three years after Cosmopolitics, Robbins admires the selective cosmopolitanism of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fictional butler, Stevens, whose “detached professional affectivity removes him sufficiently from the national passions raging around him that he can play his small part in what turns out to have been a plausible, even visionary project, a project to avoid Hitler’s rise to power and the catastrophe of World War II” (30).

58. In the later essay, Robbins argues that “an internationalist antiglobalization politics” will have to emerge out of ordinary moments of “hesitation,” which he describes in two ways: as “the effort to perceive one’s place in [the division of labor]” and as a “limited moment of ethically inspired consumer consciousness.” Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” PMLA 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 86, 89, 94.

59. Robbins, Feeling Global, 119, 23.

60. Dharwadker aims to expand “the analysis of cosmopolitanism from its usual setting in post-Enlightenment modernity and contemporaneity back toward late-medieval Europe and the classical Latin Middle Ages, even while redistributing its points of critical departure out from the north and the west to the south (Africa) and the east (Asia)” (Dharwadker, introduction, 2–3). Walter D. Mignolo aims to “reconceive cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality”; he calls this new perspective “critical cosmopolitanism” (“The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis,” 159). Clifford invokes “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” to characterize the range and specificity of different “diasporic articulations” in Routes, 36.

61. I am grateful to Vinay Dharwadker and Lucienne Loh for helping me to think about these distinctions.

62. Cuddy-Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 553. I take this to be part of Dipesh Charkrabarty’s point, in Provincializing Europe, when he distinguishes between the democratic project of representing “minority histories” and what he sees as the more radical, analytic project of using these histories to “raise … fundamental questions about the discipline” (97–98). Mignolo will describe this as changing “the terms, not just the content of the conversation” (Local Histories, Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000], 70), whereas Gaonkar will propose that “alternative modernities” are characterized by “an attitude of questioning the present” (“On Alternative Modernities,” 13).

63. See Goankar, “On Alternative Modernities,” 20–21.

64. For the argument that cosmopolitanism should be rejected even in its renovated forms, see David Parker, “Diaspora, Dissidence, and the Dangers of Cosmopolitanism,” Asian Studies Review 27, no. 2 (June 2003): 164. For the argument that cosmopolitanism should be retained as an analytic paradigm but dissociated from “class, hierarchy, and affluence,” see Dharwadker, introduction, 11. Cuddy-Keane makes a point related to mine when she argues that “cultural globalization” need not be identified solely with “economic imperialism, leaving, as the only alternative, the oppositional stance of anti-globalization” (“Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,” 541). Antoinette Burton displays the political ambiguities of twentieth-century cosmopolitanism in her elegant analysis of the “quasi-colonial postcolonial cosmopolitan” career of Santha Rama Rau (“The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau,” work in progress, 9).

65. Stefan Collini, “On Variousness; and on Persuasion,” New Left Review 27 (May/ June 2004): 96. Caroline Levine makes a powerful argument for the politics of suspenseful narration in The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

66. Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 38–39.

67. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 60.

68. Fredric Jameson and Jed Esty have asked us to notice that even those modernist texts that seem to have little or no thematic engagement with imperialism, such as E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, are marked by the influence of British imperial relations: Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism.” Esty argues not only that “we must recognize imperialism as a significant context even for modernist works that seem insulated from imperial concerns” but also that “several of modernism’s aesthetic hallmarks … can be understood as formal correlates to high imperialism” (A Shrinking Island, 6, 30).

69. For a similar argument, see Collini, “On Variousness,” in which he contends that establishing “limits to classifying presumption” can contribute to and even provoke “public discourse” (91). See Foucault’s account of the dandy, who possesses the “spectator’s posture” of the flâneur but also “transfigures the world” and takes himself “as object of a complex and difficult elaboration” (“What Is Enlightenment?” 40–41).

70. Laura Chrisman argues that “some modernist writings do contain direct representations of colonized peoples” and that, even in those modernist texts that do not contain such representations, this absence is not “automatically inevitable.” Chrisman, “Imperial Space, Imperial Place: Theories of Empire and Culture in Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak,” New Formations 34 (Summer 1998): 66. Moreover, I share Chakrabarty’s sense that the description of “colonized daily life,” what Chakrabarty calls the view of “India” rather than of “Europe,” is important but insufficient for a radical analysis of imperialism and global relations because, as he argues, seeing the world from the margins means analyzing the strategies of description that have been part of imperialist discourse and whose extension to colonized peoples, while necessary to the political efforts of anticolonialism, cannot fully disrupt the structure of privileged sight. This is what Chakrabarty means when he says that within traditional historiography, “‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones that we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on” (Provincializing Europe, 27). He adds, in his discussion of “minority histories,” that the addition of minority perspectives does not necessarily “change the nature of historical discourse” (98).

71. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 48. In chapters 4 and 6, I discuss other affects of critical thinking such as treason, which can suspend triumphalist progress in its forceful articulation of nonalignment, and vertigo, which introduces new objects of attention and new, comparative modes of attentiveness.

72. Clifford describes the charge of “cultural inventiveness” in “Mixed Feelings,” 366. Timothy Brennan attributes “self-indulgence” to cosmopolitan writers and critics in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), back cover. Aijaz Ahmad condemns “postmodern” international writers for validating “the pleasures of … unbelonging”: Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992), 157–58.

73. Even today, as Joan W. Scott has argued, an emphasis on “experience” in the disciplines of history and literary studies has had the positive value of expanding and diversifying accounts of the world but the negative value of establishing and requiring the “prior existence of individuals” whose assumption of self and cognition of experience are not addressed: Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1990), 27. On the literature of experience, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” The New York Times Book Review, 24 November 1991.

74. J. Middleton Murry, “The Classical Revival,” The Adelphi 3, no. 9 (February 1926): 589–91.

75. J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 23.

76. Edward Garnett, unsigned review of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, Nation, 28 September 1907. Reprinted in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 191–93.

77. “Cosmopolitan Art—a Friendly Dispute Between Selwyn Image and Lewis F. Day,” The Art Journal 18 (December 1902): 374–75.

78. I take my understanding of indexical meaning from John Kerkering’s excellent account in The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–20.

79. Robert Lynd, review, Daily News, 10 August 1908, 3. Reprinted in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 210–12.

80. W. J. Turner, “Stravinsky in London and Paris,” The New Statesman, 31 July 1920, 475.

81. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Japhcott (London: Verso, 1978), 101.

82. For example, see the presentation of these essays in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980).

83. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” (1947), in “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, trans. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 230.

84. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 81.

85. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus” (1948), in “What is Literature” and Other Essays, trans. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 302.

86. Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 293–94.

87. In The Emigrants, Sebald tells stories of the Holocaust and Jewish emigration that are interspersed with references to butterflies and to Vladimir Nabokov, author and famous lepidopterist. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996).

88. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 37; and Alfred Garvin Engstrom and Clive Scott, “Decadence,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 275.

89. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Modern Library, 1919), 197.

90. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1974), trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii–xv.

91. Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 148–49.

92. Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 289–93.

93. For a discussion and defense of the “poetic” aspect of de Certeau’s theory, see James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17.

94. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Ghosh writes of “literary cosmopolitics” in When Borne Across.

95. Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 2–3.

96. Stuart Hall, “The New Ethnicities” (1988), in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 161–64.

97. Traditionally, as David Damrosch explains, “world literature” referred to “an established canon of European masterpieces.” Damrosch seeks to change that definition in What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4.

98. In her introduction to After the Imperial Turn, Antoinette Burton articulates the hope that “foregrounding Britain will be viewed as a strategic maneuver designed not to reinstantiate it but, rather, to subject its presumptive centrality to interrogation” (2). I share that aspiration.

99. My argument about the function of these tactics is indebted to Raymond Williams’s methodology in Keywords. Of course, there are some significant differences between his methodology and mine: I have not presented a cultural history or genealogy of “naturalness” or “treason”; moreover, Williams analyzes a broad range of sources, including newspapers, speeches, poems, and pamphlets, while I have restricted my analysis to narrative fiction and criticism of that fiction. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 15.

1. Of course, one does not “choose” one’s culture outright, as Homi K. Bhabha has observed, because culture is the condition from which choices are made. For an excellent account of cultural indeterminacy in the early twentieth century, see Deborah Cohen, “Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 41 (October 2002): 460–83, esp. 469. For a discussion of “cultural choice” in the late twentieth century, see Homi K. Bhabha, “On Cultural Choice,” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 181–82.

2. See Deborah Cohen, “Who Was Who?” 478–80; Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heinemann, 1972), 106–28; and Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 467.

3. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), 17–18.

4. There are many different accounts of what makes up Conrad’s foreignness: see Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad (New York: Charles Scribner, 1991), 355; Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979); Geoffry Galt Harpham, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Adam Gillon, “Joseph Conrad: Polish Cosmopolitan,” in Joseph Conrad: Theory and World Fiction, ed. Wolodymyr T. Zyla and Wendell M. Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1974), 41–69.

5. Nico Israel describes this tendency in Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 23–26.

6. Writing of “ethnographic self-fashioning,” James Clifford compares Conrad to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski; here, I am comparing Conrad to aesthetes and dandies such as Oscar Wilde. See James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 92–113.

7. Fredric Jameson, “Romance and Reification: Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206–80.

8. For leading me to think about dandyism as a characteristic of books as well as of people, I am grateful to Monica L. Miller, “The Black Dandy as Bad Modernist,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 179–205. Jessica R. Feldman presents dandyism “as an expression of anti-essentialism” that extends from nineteenth-century London or Paris into figures of display in twentieth-century culture. See Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5. Many critics now treat dandyism as a cultural tactic that is available to immigrants as well as to locals. For this trend, see Susan Fillen-Yeh, ed., Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

9. See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 106; and Harpham, One of Us, 147. On the preoccupation with art and literary decadence, see Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.

10. See Richard Ellmann, “Introduction: The Critic as Artist as Wilde,” in The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.

11. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 290–319.

12. Amanda Anderson focuses on the epigram as a strategy of ethical detachment and participant observation in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 147–75. For previous studies that consider Conrad in the light of Wilde, see Paul Kirschner, “Wilde’s Shadow in Conrad’s ‘The Return,’” Notes and Queries 40 (December 1993): 495–96; and Joseph William Martin, “The Shock of Trifles: Decadence in the Novels of Joseph Conrad” (Ph.D. diss., Purdue University May 1990).

13. Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” in Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Boston: Bedford, 1996), 281.

14. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907), ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (London: Penguin, 1990), 129.

15. Conrad to Hugh-Durand Davray, January 1908, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Norman Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4:28–29.

16. Robert Lynd, review, Daily News, 10 August 1908, 3; reprint, in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 210–12.

17. Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad, rev. ed. (London: Nisbet & Co., 1924), 19.

18. Anonymous, unsigned review of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, Times Literary Supplement, 20 September 1907, 285; reprint, in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 185.

19. Edward Garnett, unsigned review of The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, Nation, 28 September 1907. Reprint, in The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 191–93.

20. Unsigned review, Glasgow News, 3 October 1907, 5. Reprinted in The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 195–97.

21. Arthur Symons, “Conrad,” in Dramatis Personae (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923), 1, 20.

22. Joseph Conrad, “Author’s Note,” in A Personal Record (1912), reprint, in The Mirror of the Sea; and A Personal Record (London: J. M. Dent, 1968), iii–vi.

23. Geoffrey Galt Harpham has called The Secret Agent Conrad’s “most consciously ‘created’ work,” and he presents the novel’s preface as the author’s sincere account of composition. Although I share Harpham’s sense of the novel’s exceptional deliberateness, I see Conrad’s preface as yet another creation. Harpham, “Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 79–81.

24. Conrad, The Secret Agent, 173.

25. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), in “Heart of Darkness” and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 140–41.

26. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1898; New York: Norton, 1979), 148. See Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 88; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 114–15.

27. See Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; New York: Norton, 1968), 27 and passim; and Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904; London: Penguin, 1983), 124 and passim.

28. See Oscar Wilde’s quip, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 236.

29. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148.

30. Nicholas Dames has observed that it is hard to find any narrative detail whose meaning, when one looks hard enough, is entirely “useless.” Within the world that Conrad describes, the ink and stamps are “useless” because the characters do not notice them; they have no denotative content. For the reader, however, the stamps and the ink have use because they participate in a genre of pretense. Conrad suggests that it is part of England’s fiction to make its own foreignness as irrelevant as possible. See Nicholas Dames, “Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity,” Nineteenth Century Literature 56, no. 1 (2001): 23–51.

31. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 54–55.

32. Jesse Matz observes, also reading Watt, that the “coding” does not occur in the “impression” but in the “explanation which follows the impression … so that what Watt calls ‘delayed decoding’ might be more appropriately be called ‘delayed en coding.’” See Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144–45. Bruce Johnson makes a similar point when he argues, “The meaning we see in an apparently discreet moment or event depends on the conceptual and emotional ‘net’ we use to capture it.” I share Matz’s and Johnson’s claims about Conrad’s aesthetic strategies, but for me these strategies exist to promote, above all, a less natural idea of culture. By displaying the process of “encoding,” Conrad suggests not only that reputation (Johnson’s “net”) precedes and guides identity but also that a change in perception can lead to a change in how culture is understood. See Bruce Johnson, “Conrad’s Impressionism and Watt’s ‘Delayed Decoding,’” in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 52, 60.

33. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 266. Noting the echo of Wilde in Conrad, Joseph Martin observes of The Secret Agent that “theatricality of one sort or another underlies virtually every character and every relationship in the novel” (“The Shock of Trifles,” 103).

34. Francesca Coppa argues that Wilde’s plays function as epigrams because they master the conventions of late-nineteenth-century theatre just as Wilde’s phrases master the language of social ritual. Coppa defines “epigram” as the citation and negotiation of one or more previous formulations of knowledge. See Francesca Coppa, “‘I Seem to Recognize a Device That Has Done Duty in Bygone Plays’: Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of Epigram,” in Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces: An Exhibition Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of the Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Fales Library, New York University, 1995), 11–19.

35. Oscar Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 1086.

1. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.

2. Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3. Joseph Valente, “James Joyce and the Cosmopolitan Sublime,” in Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 61–62.

4. Vincent J. Cheng, “‘Terrible Queer Creatures’: Joyce, Cosmopolitanism, and the Inauthentic Irishman,” in James Joyce and the Fabrication of Irish Identity, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (Amsterdam: Rodolfi, 2001), 32.

5. For an important exception that is focused on Joyce’s resistance to nationalism, see David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Review, 1993).

6. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–20.

7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; reprint, London: Verso, 1991), 44; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 176; Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 217.

8. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 94; Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981), 16. Appadurai has proposed that local neighborhoods are often at odds with nation-states “because the commitments and attachments (sometimes mislabeled ‘primordial’) that characterize local subjectivities are more pressing, more continuous, and sometimes more distracting than the nation-state can afford” (191).

9. See my discussion of this issue, in relation to African American culture and the Harlem Renaissance, in “Shakespeare in Harlem: The Norton Anthology, ‘Propaganda,’ Langston Hughes,” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 1999): 495–519.

10. See, for example, Adorno’s aphorism “Morality and Style” in Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 101. For a seminal discussion of how habitual attention is created and resisted in literature, see Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 31–32.

12. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator,” 31.

13. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 289–92. For Williams, vagrancy is exile without “principle.” Joyce’s view of exile emphasizes freedom from those institutionalized principles—nation, empire, church—that keep cultures from changing. For example, see Stephen Dedalus’s speech about “silence, exile, and cunning” in Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1999), 212.

14. James Joyce to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906, in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 82.

15. Joyce to Richards, 23 June 1906 and 20 May 1906, in Selected Letters, 88–90.

16. Joyce to Richards, 5 May 1906, in Selected Letters, 83.

17. S. P. B. Mais, “An Irish Revel: And Some Flappers,” Daily Express, 25 March 1922, reprint, in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 1:191.

18. Valéry Larbaud, “James Joyce,” Nouvelle Revue Française 18 (April 1922): 385–405, reprint, in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 252–62; references in my text refer to the Critical Heritage printing. John Middleton Murry, “Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses” (1922), in Defending Romanticism: Selected Criticism of John Middleton Murry, ed. Malcolm Woodfield (Bristol: The Bristol Press, 1989), 117–20. Murry’s review was first published in the Nation and Athanæum in April 1922, but citations in the text are to the reprinted version. See, also, Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). For an excellent account of early-twentieth-century debates about the meanings of “Europe,” see Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

19. Larbaud introduces Miró and Gomez by full name, as recent arrivals on the European scene. Gabriel Miró (1879–1930), known as a novelist of poetic, impressionist style, was critical of religious institutions; Ramón Gómez (1888–1963) was an avant-garde writer, best known for his literary gatherings, his biographies of Ruskin and Wilde, and his Wildean epigrams, which he called greguerías. See Philip Ward, ed., The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 246–47, 258, 390–91.

20. It is important to Joseph M. Hone, an Irish reviewer, that Joyce’s “struggle for freedom had to be fought before he left Ireland.” Hone, “A Letter from Ireland,” London Mercury 5 (January 1923): 306–8, reprint, in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 297–98. Similarly, Ernest Boyd, whose book Ireland’s Literary Renaissance included Joyce in its revised edition, argues, “no Irish writer is more Irish than Joyce” and defends Joyce from “a prematurely cosmopolitan reputation,” by which he means a reputation removed from the local context of Joyce’s early life. For Boyd, it is important to prove “the separate existence of Anglo-Irish literature.” Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 404–5.

21. Joyce is wary of the strategies of cultural publicity that were affirmed in this period by African American intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, or that Boyd attributes to participants in the Irish Revival. Ross Posnock argues that Du Bois may have been wary of these strategies, too; Posnock contends that Du Bois embraced the distinctiveness of African American culture only as a “critical stage” on the way to a critique of authenticity. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–107. Tracy Mishkin argues that intellectuals of both the Harlem and the Irish Renaissances tended to accept racial essence as a way to claim that African American or Irish culture provides an important and distinctive alternative to dominant American or English culture. Tracy Mishkin, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity, Representation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 73.

22. James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 171.

23. James Joyce, “Home Rule Comes of Age” (1907), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 194–95.

24. James Joyce, “The Day of Rabblement” (1901), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 70.

25. See, for example, Joyce’s claim that Ireland is not helped by “an appeal to the past” in Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” 173–74.

26. “The Dead” is something of an exception to this rule. See Cheng, “‘Terrible Queer Creatures,’” 25–26; Bruce Robbins, “The Newspapers Were Right: Cosmopolitanism, Forgetting, and ‘The Dead’” Interventions 5, no. 1 (2003): 101–12.

27. See Duffy’s discussion of Bloom’s flânerie in The Subaltern Ulysses, 65.

28. James Joyce, “Two Gallants” in Dubliners (1914; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993), 43–55.

29. Mark Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.121.

30. Since the Enlightenment, Luisa Passerini argues, French and English writers have assumed that courtly love is a cornerstone of modern European tradition, dating from Provençal love poetry and derived from contacts with the Celtic nations, Germans, Scandinavians, and Scythians (Russians); some writers have attributed elements of the courtly tradition to contacts with Moorish culture as well, thus undermining the claim that courtly love is “purely” European (Europe in Love, 2–3).

31. Joyce’s story serves to undermine the ethical claims of British sovereignty by associating its conditions with a sordid narrative of Irish poverty. While I agree with Vincent Cheng that the British coin “robs [the characters] … of their own sovereignty” (Joyce, Race, and Empire, 116), I argue that Joyce’s story also attempts to displace any sense that sovereignty can be entirely one’s “own.”

32. Joyce to Richards, 5 May 1906, in Selected Letters, 82.

33. Jonathan Culler, “The Call of the Phoneme,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 4.

34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 248.

35. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 101; and Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 312.

36. Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 3–4.

37. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 312.

38. Theodor W. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 292.

39. Stephen thus participates in a kind of double heresy: refusing to accept the general principle that heretics write bad poetry and refusing to accept the congruence between moral and aesthetic badness.

40. See OED, 2nd edition, s.v. “funnel” and “tundish.”

41. The dean tells Stephen, “you have certainly hit the nail on the head” (159); he is incapable of distinguishing between words spoken in sincerity and words spoken in irony, such as Stephen’s use of the word “detain” (161).

42. See discussion of Stephen’s allusion to Coleridge in Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 237.

43. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1986). Joyce announces that “Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum” on the third page of the chapter (182), but even in the first paragraph Conmee thinks to himself, punning on the name of a man whose death has left his family destitute (Dignam), “Vere dignum et instum est”: “It is indeed fitting and right” (180). This is the opening phrase of the Eucharist, but it implies, also, Conmee’s abstract complacency in the face of misery. See Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for Joyce’s Ulysses, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 261. Consider this phrase alongside Wilfred Owen’s poem about World War I, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1918), which attacks the notion that it is fine and honorable to die for one’s country by showing the physical suffering whose invisibility the rhetoric of decorum helps to maintain.

44. For example, one has to compare all of the invalids in the chapter, literal and figurative, to Blazes Boylan’s claim that the basket of “shamefaced peaches” he is buying for Molly is “for an invalid” (187). The chapter gives as much attention to Boylan in his coarseness as it does to others in their suffering, if only to make the reader do the same and to make the reader notice that the salesgirl seems to have more sympathy for Boylan’s fake invalid than most characters have for the invalids with whom they actually come in contact.

45. Stephen’s sympathy for Dilly, his sister, makes him careful to conceal his true opinions; Molly’s sympathy for the one-legged sailor leads her to reach out a hand and throw him a coin; in another scene, Boylan makes himself seem sympathetic in order to attract the interest of a salesgirl. These are imperfect encounters, but they are not based on an established, invoked correctness established in advance.

46. See, for example, Duffy’s chapter on “Cyclops” in The Subaltern Ulysses, 93–129; Cheng’s discussion in “Joyce, Race, and Empire,” 191–224; and Neil Levi’s in “‘See that Straw? That’s a Straw’: Anti-Semitism and Narrative Form in Ulysses,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (September 2002): 375–88.

47. Gibson has argued that the rhetoric of the citizen and the nameless narrator, in its vulgarity, is in fact preferable to the decorous, flattened rhetoric of the impersonal, mythologized parodies, which Gibson associates with Anglo-Irish revivalism (Joyce’s Revenge, 118–26). It seems right to me, as Gibson argues, that Joyce finds the false courtesy of Anglo-Irish nationalism far more insidious than the explicit and vulgar hostility of the Sinn Feiner (107). Duffy has observed that Bloom, like the citizen, speaks in platitudes, which means that his perspectives are sometimes limited by the habits of his language (The Subaltern Ulysses, 112).

48. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 12.

49. Levi, “‘See that Straw?’” 380–83.

50. For recent examples, see Cheng, Joyce, Race, Empire, 211–12; Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses, 126–27; Gibson is an exception to this rule, in his striking focus on the Citizen as “a liberatingly comic relief” from the dour rhetoric of Anglo-Irish Revivalism (Joyce’s Revenge, 124–26).

51. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), xi.

1. Bruce Robbins, “The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16.

2. Judith Butler, “Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear,” Social Text 72 (Fall 2002): 180.

3. Fred Moten, “The New International of Decent Feelings,” Social Text 72 (Fall 2002): 189.

4. Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings” (1946), in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 30.

5. See discussion of “planetary humanism” in the introduction to this book.

6. Jacques Lezra, “Unrelated Passions,” differences: A journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 83–84.

7. Edward Said, “Heroism and Humanism,” Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, no. 463 (6–12 January 2000), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/463/op10.htm.

8. I am grateful to Amanda Claybaugh for leading me to think about the semivisibility of servants in Mrs. Dalloway.

9. M. C. Bradbrook, “Notes on the Style of Mrs. Woolf,” Scrutiny 1, no. 1 (1932): 33–38; Q. D. Leavis, “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!” Scrutiny 7, no. 1 (1938): 203–14.

10. Woolf imagines a “Society of Outsiders” in Three Guineas (1938), in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 2000), 232–45.

11. Others have noticed that Woolf was not an outsider alone: she was married to Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish and a strong advocate of antiwar efforts. See Natania Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Christine Froula’s discussion of Woolf’s “outsider patriotism” in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 270.

12. Late into the twentieth century, scholars continued to argue that Woolf’s fiction is neither cosmopolitan nor modernist because it privileges England and the minutiae of upper-class life. For assertions and refutations of this argument, see Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés (New York: Schocken, 1970), 17; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 23; Hugh Kenner, “The Making of the Modernist Canon,” Chicago Review 34, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 57; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Geopolitical Literary: Internationalizing Feminism at ‘Home’-the Case of Virginia Woolf,” in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 118; Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 35–76; and Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde.

13. For example, see Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 14–15; Michèle Barrett, “Virginia Woolf: Subjectivity and Politics,” in Imagination in Theory: Essays on Writing and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 35–67; William R. Handley, “War and the Politics of Narration in Jacob’s Room,” in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 110–33; and Michele Pridmore-Brown, “1939–40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism,” PMLA 113, no. 3 (May 1998): 408–21.

14. Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 118. Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), has proposed that Orlando and The Waves, “by constructing new narrative models of cosmopolitan community … intervene directly in the political life of Britain” (117).

15. R. D. Charques, “The Bourgeois Novel” (1933), in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1997), 344; Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (1934; reprint, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 11.

16. While Leavis’s review is focused on Three Guineas (1938), in which Woolf explicitly and contentiously aligns British tyranny at home with German tyranny abroad, Leavis’s disdain is similar to the criticism that other critics directed at Woolf’s earlier works of fiction and nonfiction.

17. Michèle Barrett presents these examples, taken from Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, in “The Great War and Post-Modern Memory,” New Formations 41 (August 2000): 139.

18. E. M. Forster, “Visions” (1919), in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1997), 69.

19. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.

20. Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Two Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1917).

21. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), 241–42.

22. The Hogarth Press published a slightly revised version of “The Mark on the Wall” in 1919, under its own cover; the story was further revised for Monday or Tuesday in 1921.

23. Leonard’s story precedes Virginia’s in this publication. For a more extensive account of the relationship between Virginia’s and Leonard’s stories, see Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together.

24. David Cesarani, “An Embattled Minority: The Jews in Britain During the First World War,” in The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Radical Right, and Minorities in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 61–81.

25. Leonard Woolf, “Three Jews” in Woolf and Woolf, Two Stories, 6–8.

26. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 2nd ed., ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989), 89.

27. Also writing in 1917, Victor Shklovsky warns that habitual thought “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” Like Woolf, Shklovsky brings together the perception of everyday, domestic objects and the perception of war, arguing that stereotypes and metonymic thinking impede the experience both of furniture and of fear. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12. Unlike Shklovsky, who presents his case for “defamiliarization” as a universal problem, Woolf uses evasion to respond to the specific conditions of British triumphalism.

28. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, dir. Marleen Gorris, videotape, Fox Lorber Films, 1997; Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

29. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; reprint, New York: Harcourt, 1981), 3.

30. The film shows another scene from the past that the novel, significantly, omits: the scene of Clarissa’s engagement to Richard, which in the film involves a kiss between them.

31. Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 131.

32. Barrett, “Virginia Woolf Meets Michel Foucault” in Imagination in Theory, 95.

33. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, argues that after the First World War, it was no longer possible to use heroic language in everyday communication: before the war, “everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant,” Fussell explains (21). Although Mrs. Dalloway offers a sharp example of this phenomenon, Fussell presents Woolf as one of the modernist writers “not involved with the war” (314–15).

34. For Septimus, see Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 21, 25, 69; see Clarissa’s “excitement” and “exquisite moment” on 34; and Peter’s description of the “sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain” on 154, and his “excitement” in the final sentence of the novel, 194.

35. Pat Barker makes the conditions of stuttering and muteness the subject of Regeneration, a novel that takes as its principal topic the relationship between wartime doctors and returning soldiers. Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991).

36. Gilles Deleuze, “A Conversation: What Is It? What Is It For?” in Dialogues, by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 4.

37. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1925), in The Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 150.

38. At the end of her career, Woolf thought she might create a new form of the novel, the “Novel-Essay,” which would have combined the materials she came to publish separately as Three Guineas and The Years. See Michèle Barrett, introduction to Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, xxv.

39. Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), 244–47; Virginia Woolf, “The Artist and Politics,” in The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1948), 228.

40. “Camouflage” entered English usage during the First World War, when the technique of mimicry, drawn from the natural world of imitation, was widely adopted by military strategists to disguise armaments and supplies against enemy surveillance and attack. Camouflage was directed at aircraft photography, which could identify trucks or guns in the countryside far below because the natural environment, in its disorder, is easily distinguished from the artificial, man-made order of military equipment; the trick of camouflage is to break up the lines and boundaries between nature and art by making art as disordered as nature. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “camouflage” comes from 1917, when the term was still new enough for the Daily Mail to explain, “The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed ‘camouflage.’” See Roy M. Stanley II, To Fool a Glass Eye (Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1998); Tim Newark and Quentin Newark, Brassey’s Book of Camouflage (London: Brassey’s, 1996). Fussell observes that, at the start of the First World War, “camouflage” was a “new stylish foreign word” that people were embarrassed to pronounce (The Great War and Modern Memory, 29).

41. Camouflage is effective in war and in rhetoric because it transforms the fact of multiple, unrelated, perhaps hostile objects into the appearance of homogeneity and accordance. It aspires to impalpability: it seeks to obviate concealment and comparison, to neutralize the disruptive contrast between, say, “the hues of autumn leaves” and the “guns” used for shooting down German pilots, or between the vivid illusion of leaves and the “strips of green and brown stuff” whose lifeless reality goes unnoticed (Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace,” 245–46).

42. Barrett, Imagination in Theory, 67.

43. As Woolf puts it in “The Artist and Politics,” the artist is compelled by two, related causes: “The first is his own survival; the other is the survival of his art” (228). It is important to Woolf that the fight against war by artists should not ignore or aid the wartime fight against art. Woolf refuses priority to either of these causes by attaching one activity to the other: the compulsion to create art that conforms to political interests is, Woolf argues, always a symptom of aggression, and it is one of the social dangers against which artists must fight.

44. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 546.

45. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” (1936), in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970), 144. Although Lukács does not discuss Woolf explicitly, he singles out for particular criticism any author who “writes from the point of view of his characters” (133).

46. M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel” (1941), in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 13.

47. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 86.

48. Adorno makes the first comment on many occasions in his work, and takes it back or revises it at least twice: once in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 362; and once in the late essay “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, 251. For an account of the development of Adorno’s thinking on this topic, see Lyn Hejinian, “Barbarism,” in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 325.

49. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 18.

50. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

51. Virginia Woolf, The Years (1938), ed. Hermione Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 319. My thanks to Michèle Barrett for alerting me to this reference.

52. See editor’s note in Virginia Woolf, The Years, 477–78; and Rowland Ryder, Edith Cavell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 237.

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (1986; New York: Vintage, 1989); Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989; New York: Vintage, 1990). Future references to these texts will be designated, respectively, by the abbreviations A and R. Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which does seem to take place in or around the year of its publication, also involves memories of the 1950s and the interwar era. Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (1982; New York: Vintage, 1990). Future references to this text will be designated by the abbreviation P.

2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6 (1927), trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library: 1993), 290–91. For this idea of retrospective “recognition,” see Lee Edelman, Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994), 19–21; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1990), 223.

3. Maud Ellmann, “‘The Intimate Difference’: Power and Representation in The Ambassadors,” in Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903), ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, 2nd ed. (New York.: W. W. Norton, 1994), 508–9.

4. Henry James, preface to The Golden Bowl (1909), in The Golden Bowl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), lviii.

5. I mean here by “national allegory” both Fredric Jameson’s sense of “private individual destiny” standing as metaphor for “public third-world culture and society” and individual or narrative self-presentation standing as national characteristic. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 69 and passim; Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 12.

6. Ishiguro’s effort resonates, in strategy and in practice, with Roland Barthes’s attempt to conceive “what our language does not conceive”: that is, to consider how language and other cultural systems create both limits and opportunities for knowledge. Barthes imagines “an aberrant grammar [that] would at least have the advantage of casting suspicion on the very ideology of our speech.” Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 7–8.

7. See my discussion of the Deleuzian stammer in chapter 3.

8. Gilles Deleuze, “A Conversation: What Is It? What Is It For?” in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 5.

9. Theodor W. Adorno, “Words from Abroad,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nichosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 185.

10. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 224–28.

11. Bruce King, “The New Internationalism: Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Timothy Mo, and Kazuo Ishiguro,” in The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, ed. James Acheson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 207. Also, see Stanley Kauffmann, “The Floating World,” New Republic, 6 November 1995, 43.

12. Valerie Purton, “The Reader in a Floating World: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro,” in The Literature of Place, ed. Norman Page and Peter Preston (London: Macmillan, 1993), 170–71. This is not unlike Pico Iyer’s remark that Ishiguro is “as Japanese as his name, and as English as the flawless prose he writes.” Notice the parallel here between the distinct and self-evident nationality implied by a name and that offered by the perfection of a literary style. Pico Iyer, “Waiting Upon History,” Partisan Review 58 (Summer 1991): 586.

13. Anne Chisholm, “Lost Worlds of Pleasure,” Times Literary Supplement, 14 February 1986, 162.

14. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 112; emphasis in the original.

15. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 33.

16. Chow, Writing Diaspora, 49; emphasis in the original.

17. Chow, Writing Diaspora, 30. Bhabha similarly argues that replacing bad images with good ones transforms an “‘other’ culture” into a “docile body of difference,” forced to be “a good object of knowledge” (The Location of Culture, 31).

18. Slavoj Žižek, discussed in Chow, Writing Diaspora, 52–53. See Slavoj Žižek, “How the Non-Duped Err,” Qui Parle 4, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 1–20.

19. Tom Wilhelmus, “Between Cultures,” The Hudson Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 321.

20. Gabriele Annan, “On the High Wire,” The New York Review of Books, 7 December 1989, 3.

21. Annan, “On the High Wire,” 3–4.

22. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 95.

23. Kazuo Ishiguro, “A Family Supper,” Esquire (March 1990): 207–11.

24. Alan Wolfe argues persuasively that “to mention suicide and Japan in the same sentence is to bring to bear a set of stereotypes that continue to shape Western perceptions of non-Western cultures”: Alan Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), xiii.

25. The relationship between “the tradition of war-related or anachronistic suicides” and “appeals to a waning sense of national self-affirmation” is discussed at length in Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, xv and passim.

26. Two of the twentieth-century’s best-known Japanese novelists, Yukio Mishima and the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, committed suicide. Mishima and Kawabata often wrote about the effect of “foreign” culture on “Japanese” traditions.

27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 119.

28. Barthes, Mythologies, 109; emphasis in original.

29. Kathryn Morton, “After the War Was Lost,” New York Times Book Review, 8 June 1986, 19; Hermione Lee, “Quiet Desolation,” New Republic, 22 January 1990, 37; Louis Menand, “Anxious in Dreamland,” New York Times Book Review, 15 October 1995, 7. Roland Barthes attributes the “reality effect” to those narrative details whose sole function is the promise of referentiality. See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148.

30. In The Artist of the Floating World, there is a similar alliance between the art of painting that Ono has been taught and the art of the novel that his voice conveys.

31. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 67.

32. Chantal Zabus, “Language, Orality, and Literature,” in New National and Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 34.

33. Kazuo Ishiguro and Oe Kenzaburo, “The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation,” Boundary 2 18, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 115.

34. If one needed any more evidence that Ichiro’s “mistranslations” signify America by overgeneralized metonymy, one might note that an English reviewer misidentifies “Hi yo Silver” as the voice of Roy Rogers, a difference that in no way reduces the “Japaneseness” of the “great Samurai heroes” to which he is compared (Chisholm, “Lost Worlds,” 162).

35. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 158–59; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 148–49; Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 101; and, for a more recent account of “unreliable narration” in the light of poststructuralist models of subjectivity, see Kathleen Wall, “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 24, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 18–42.

36. Metaphorically, the “primal scene” is a traumatic event that is always out of reach: either because it is understood, if it is ever really understood, only at a later time or because it is fantasized in retrospect, patched together from later echoes. Sigmund Freud, “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms” (1917), in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1968), 369–70; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 388.

37. The film that Ono and Ichiro attend is recognizable as the Japanese original of Godzilla, which was first released in 1954. In the film, the monster’s destructiveness evokes the destructiveness of the atom bombs, though Godzilla destroys Tokyo rather than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Whether or not Ichiro and Ono watch Godzilla—the title is never given and Ono remembers seeing the film in 1948, six years before the film was actually released—what they see is a disturbing reminder of the past, both because the film shows violence against Japan and because it encourages its viewers to take pleasure in the spectacle.

38. For Ishiguro’s extended meditation on failed consolation, see his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995; New York: Vintage, 1996).

1. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, Del.: Consortium, 1992), 343. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation” (1990), in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 167.

2. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.

3. For example, see Salman Rushdie, “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Penguin, 1991), 67. For the claim that Rushdie and other “cosmopolitan” writers are indiscriminate in their celebration of hybridity, see Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Race and Class 31, no. 1 (1989): 1–19.

4. Timothy Brennan has called the world of the cosmopolitan novelist “a convenient no-place,” and Aijaz Ahmad condemns “postmodern” international writers for validating “the pleasures of … unbelonging.” Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 306; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992), 157–58.

5. Brennan, At Home in the World, 306.

6. See Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), xiii. For critique of Brennan’s charges against cosmopolitan writers, see Rosemary Marangoly George, “The Cosmopolitan Club,” Novel 25, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 103–5.

7. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), xxii–xiii.

8. Suspicious of “apostolic” drama, Bruce Robbins calls for “an internationalist ethics of the everyday, one that will not tell us solely what to die or kill for but also how action at a distance can be part of how we live.” Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 23.

9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii–xv. First published in French in 1974.

10. Gerald Mazorati, “Salman Rushdie: Fiction’s Embattled Infidel,” New York Times, 29 January 1989.

11. Brennan, Salman Rushdie, 149.

12. See Lisa Appignanesi and Sarah Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990); and Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990).

13. Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith” (1990), in Imaginary Homelands, 394.

14. Rushdie describes this scenario in Fury (New York: Random House, 2001), 35–36. See my discussion at the end of this chapter.

15. Stuart Hall, “The New Ethnicities” (1988), in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 162.

16. One example of Sisodia’s entanglement with English culture is his invocation of Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. Dodgson, who stuttered throughout his life, called himself “the Dodo” because “Do, Do” were the first two syllables of his last name, as he pronounced it. Sisodia may give the name “Dodo” to the English, but the stutter allows Rushdie to suggest that “Dodo” fits Sisodia as well. For a discussion of Dodgson’s stutter, see Hugh Haughton, introduction to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 1998), xvi. There are many other references to Carroll’s work in Rushdie’s fiction, some of which I mention later in this chapter. In general, the image of a child falling through a looking glass into a mysterious, somewhat aggressive, somewhat fantastic world suits Rushdie’s seriocomic image of immigrant experience.

17. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 3.

18. Salman Rushie, quoted in Mazorati, “Salman Rushdie: Fiction’s Embattled Infidel,” 100.

19. By 1991, critics were putting authenticity in quotation marks. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” New York Times Book Review, 24 November 1991. For a discussion of the critical shift into and away from authenticity, see Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991).

20. Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 100–101. Waldron’s essay was first published in the Michigan Journal of Law Reform in 1992.

21. See Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (1982) and “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” in Imaginary Homelands, 16–17 and 63–67. In “‘Commonwealth Literature,’” Rushdie asserts that he is reluctant to resign the category of “British writer,” unmodified, to authors who are white or native to the British Isles, especially because he does not promote his own work as an authentic representation of India or Pakistan in miniature, “homogenous and unbroken” (67).

22. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 20.

23. For a model of uncommitted cosmopolitanism, see Alex Zwerdling’s account of T. S. Eliot’s internationalism in Alex Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates in London (New York: Basic Books, 1998); for a model of cosmopolitanism as “worldwide allegiance,” see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 4.

24. Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” 394.

25. For an argument in favor of this shift, see Michel Foucault, “So Is It Important to Think?” in Power, ed. James D. Faubion, in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 3 (New York: The New York Press, 2000), 457. For a discussion of this shift, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “‘Authenticity.’”

26. See Homi K. Bhabha on the “self-critical joke” in “On Cultural Choice,” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New Yorkn: Routledge, 2000), 196.

27. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), 163.

28. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 228.

29. James Thomson, “Ode: Rule, Britannia” (1740), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, fifth ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1986), 2474–75.

30. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World,” in The Location of Culture, 225.

31. Salman Rushdie, “Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies,” in East, West (New York: Random House, 1994), 3–16.

32. Two of the other proverbs in the story are also Miss Rehana’s: “Good advice should find good money” and, “When Fate sends a gift, one receives good fortune” (6–7). Muhammad Ali introduces one proverb, but he does not understand its full meaning: “The oldest fools are bewitched by the youngest girls” (11).

33. These are the story’s implicit truisms. The explicit truisms, voiced by Muhammad Ali, are “one’s parents act in one’s best interests”; “they found you a good and honest man who has kept his word and sent for you”; “now you have a lifetime to get to know him, and to love” (14).

34. Salman Rushdie, “The Courter,” in East, West, 173–211.

35. Chess was first played in India; its modern rules are European but the pieces are Indian and Persian in origin. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of the Game (London: Batsford, 1985).

36. “You see it’s like a portmanteau,” Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice: “there are two meanings packed into one word.” Lewis Carroll, Though the Looking Glass, in Alice in Wonderland, 2nd ed., ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1992), 164. Gray defines a portmanteau, in the literal sense, as “a traveling bag that opens, like a book, into two equal compartments (164 n. 1).

37. Haughton, introduction, xvi.

38. Derek Attridge, “Unpacking the Portmanteau, or Who’s Afraid of Finnegan’s Wake?” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (London: Blackwell, 1998), 145.

39. The narrator and his siblings call their ayah “Aya” or “Jumble-Aya,” dropping the “h” in order to make her job into an intimate name and into a game, the palindrome and the pun (“jambalaya” is a mixture of ingredients, in the mixture of languages called Creole) personalizing for the children what is otherwise a category of person.

40. Amitava Kumar makes this point persuasively in his discussion of antinationalist and capitalist forms of hybridity. Amitava Kumar, Bombay-London–New York (New York: Routledge, 2002), 54–55.

1. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,” (2000) in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 41–48.

2. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996); first published in German in 1992. Future references to this novel will be designated by the abbreviation E. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998); first published in German in 1995. Future references to this novel will be designated by the abbreviation R.

3. W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999); first published in German in 1990. Future references to this novel will be designated by the abbreviation V.

4. Peter Novick has attributed “the centering of the Holocaust in the minds of American Jews” at the end of the twentieth century to the desire for a political vision that does without “moral ambiguities.” Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life,” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 478, 476.

5. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 88, emphasis in original.

6. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta, 1966), 3–14, esp. 13; Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 14. On Sontag’s politics of metaphor, see D. A. Miller, “Sontag’s Urbanity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 212–20.

7. Andreas Huyssen and to some extent Amir Eshel have suggested that Sebald’s narratives combine many instances of violence and genocide (the Holocaust, British imperialism in Ireland, Belgian imperialism in the Congo, Napoleon’s march through Europe, etc.) into one unerring, uncompromising “‘paradigm’ of organizing, aggressive rationality” (Eshel), in which there is no resistance, no human agency, and none of the idiosyncrasy or accident that a more ironic style of analysis would display. Simon Ward argues, in response to Huyssen, that this irony is present in Sebald’s visible fragmentation of his own narratives and in his dialectical movement between details and high vantage points. Andreas Huyssen, “Rewritings and New Beginnings: W. G. Sebald and the Literature of the Air War,” in Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 138–57; Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71–96, esp. 88–89; Simon Ward, “Ruins and Poetics in the Works of W. G. Sebald,” in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 66–67.

8. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg argue that “the historicization of the Holocaust [risks] becoming an occasion for its relativization, and normalization,” in “Two Kinds of Uniqueness: The Universalization of the Holocaust” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 444.

9. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Uniqueness, Comparison, and the Politics of Memory: Introduction,” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 441.

10. And Sebald insists that the Allied air war, however much destruction it caused in German cities, was “provoked” by German atrocities. W. G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 103. Future references to this essay will be designated by the abbreviation “AW.”

11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

12. W. G. Sebald, “Between History and Natural History: On the Literary Description of Total Destruction,” in Campo Santo (New York: Random House, 2005), 77. Future references to this essay will be designated by the abbreviation “BH.” In “Rewritings and New Beginnings,” Andreas Huyssen argues convincingly that “Air War and Literature” is a reworking of “Between History and Natural History” (148).

13. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 12.

14. In an excellent analysis of Eichmann in Jeruselum, Kim Rostan presents a theory of “speculative witnessing,” which, she argues, allowed Hannah Arendt to supplement Eichmann’s testimony with the scenes he refused to remember. Rostan’s essay has helped me to think about the significance of speculation in Sebald’s work. Kim Rostan, “Arendt’s Speculative Witnessing,” work in progress.

15. In Austerlitz, Sebald’s last novel, a character recalling the occupation of Prague by the Nazis admits that she was “particularly upset”-really, upset for the first time-by “the instant change to driving on the right.” W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 171. Future references to this text will be designated by the abbreviation A. In Vertigo, the narrator reports that when his wife’s grandmother died, what he thought about most was “the blue half-empty pack of Bad Ischl salt under the sink in her council flat in Lorez Mandl Gasse and which she would never now be able to use up” (V 46); in The Emigrants, Max Ferber, whose mother perished in a concentration camp while he was sent to England as a child, wishes that he had never unpacked the suitcase she had packed for him (E 188). The final example of the budgerigars is from R 176–77.

16. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” (1936), in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971), 110–48.

17. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), ix.

18. Amitava Kumar, ed., Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (New York: Routledge, 2004), xix.

19. In one story that Kumar includes in his anthology, a young man comes to know London by learning the A to Z (the London street map) by heart. This is an extract from Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). In Kumar’s anthology, the extract is entitled “A to Z Street Atlas.”

20. Among the many discussions of Sebald’s debt to Walter Benjamin are Eshel, “Against the Power of Time,” 83; Andreas Huyssen, “Grey Zones of Remembrance,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 971; Martin Swales, “Theoretical Reflections on the Work of W. G. Sebald,” in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 28; Massimo Leone, “Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald,” in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 98; and Sebald, “AW” 67–68.

21. See Benjamin’s famous dictum: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

22. Leone, “Textual Wanderings,” 97–98; Benjamin, Illuminations, 263.

23. See my discussion of Horkheimer and the tradition of critical theory in the introduction to this book.

24. Eshel, “Against the Power of Time,” 92.

25. He shares this project with Étienne Balibar, who wants citizenship to be seen as “a civil process” rather than a “legal status.” See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 132.

26. By writable, I mean that Sebald allows the stories of famous people to be interpreted rather than invoked as if they mean something by themselves. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 15–16.

27. Sebald’s last novel focuses on a noncelebrity who wants to undo the anonymity that a change of name has imposed. The novel records the narrator’s intermittent but intense friendship with Jacques Austerlitz, who until his adolescence was called Dafydd Elias by the Welsh couple that raised him. Austerlitz, it turns out, was part of a kindertransport, which brought him to Britain, at age four, from Nazi-occupied Prague. On arrival, he was given not an English but a Welsh name, which erased his attachment to a Jewish-Czech family in cosmopolitan Prague and replaced it with an attachment to a Calvinist family in provincial Wales. The novel describes Austerlitz’s efforts to perceive and to analyze the process of erasure and replacement, both in his own history and in the recent history of Europe.

28. Sebald, A 151; W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Random House, 2002), 89.

29. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), xiii; Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 7–13; Joseph Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? Lectures in the Philosophy of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 5.

30. Swales, “Theoretical Reflections,” 25.

31. Eshel, “Against the Power of Time,” 75, 89. Huyssen, “Gray Zones,” 972.

32. Gillian Tindall has proposed that Sebald’s novels seem to have been “thought in English” before being written in German, and Arthur Williams asserts that even if the novels are thought and written in German, they “arrive at a presentation of German issues in a framework which is anything but German.” Gillian Tindall, “The Fortress of the Heart,” The Times Literary Supplement, 19 October 2001, 21; Arthur Williams, “W. G. Sebald: A Holistic Approach to Borders, Texts, and Perspectives,” in German-Language Literature Today: International and Popular? ed. Arthur Williams, Stuart Parks, and Julian Preece (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), 99. Williams thinks of Sebald not as English or German but as “European.”

33. Caryl Phillips, “Extravagant Strangers,” in A New World Order (New York: Vintage, 2001), 292.

34. Dipesh Chakrabarty, quoted in Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadaquacy and Indespenability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.

35. Burton, “Introduction,” 1.

36. Peter Hulme, quoted in Burton, “Introduction,” 3.

37. For a description and helpful analysis of this conventional usage, see Elaine K. Ginsberg, “The Politics of Passing,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 1–18.

38. W. G. Sebald, Die Ringes Des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt: Eichborn Verlag, 1995), 5.

39. The English edition of the novel, which foregoes the first epigraph and translates the German quotation (a definition of the novel’s title phrase) into English, offers this effect somewhat less powerfully. In the English edition, Sebald discards Milton’s remark, “Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably.” In the German edition, this quotation is mistakenly attributed to Paradise Lost.

40. In English: “those unhappy souls … who look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished”: Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, 23 March 1890, in The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad, vol. 1 (1861–1897), ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 43.

41. Silk appears in the chapter on Conrad and Casement as the material of an armchair in which the narrator falls asleep, as the material of a dress (worn by Conrad’s mother “as a token of mourning for her people suffering the humiliation of foreign rule”), as a poetic figure (the soot ash of burning manuscripts is “like a scrap of black silk”), and possibly as the substance of a hangman’s rope (Casement’s) (R 103, 106, 108, 134). In the German edition, the novel is called The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage. There is no subtitle in the English edition.

42. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 88.

43. Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 101.

44. Colm Tóibín, “The Tragedy of Roger Casement,” New York Review of Books, 27 May 2004, 53–57.

45. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 196–97. Marking the difference between 1916 and 1995, Sebald argues that Casement’s homosexuality, far from compromising his defense of Ireland, schooled him in the observation of marginal experiences: “it was precisely Casement’s homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centers of power” (R 134).