On the verge of the world: Internationalism in the text of modernism

Abstract

This dissertation examines the influence of internationalism in twentieth-century writing with special regard to the British scene, as writers there negotiated the triple phenomena of globalization, decolonization, and World War. My project begins with a historical-theoretical survey that follows a trajectory from eighteenth-century Enlightenment writers on internationalism, through Marx and the founding of the First International in 1864, and into the twentieth century, when the movements of global capital made national boundaries increasingly permeable and modernist experiment highlighted the interpenetration of cultures. The chapters that focus more specifically on literary production take up the writing of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and C. L. R. James, reading them with an emphasis on how they imagine international topographies and twentieth-century political identity. Pulling in the opposite direction to the centrifugal force of internationalism, in a tension that is highlighted in my project, is the centripetal force of nationalism and national identity. I read internationalism as a discourse that hovers at the boundaries of nationalism, and, in various guises, appears to threaten it. The period I investigate is bracketed on one side by Conrad, whose texts not only stand at the threshold of modernism, but also appear to uphold and undermine simultaneously the ideas of imperialism and nationalism, and on the other side by C. L. R. James, whose work represents the growing body of postcolonial literature that endeavors to imagine what kind of connections and affiliations could supplant dissolved colonial ties. The governing thesis of this project is that modernism was “international” in more than the obvious way it has been portrayed. Modernism has been described as international because it was a movement that flourished in a number of different countries, and because of the way artists and writers circulated in the multinational metropolitan center. In addition to these factors, and perhaps because of them, I argue that internationalism is itself a political idea articulated in the literature of this period