Reviews for Reconstructing public philosophy

The average rating for Reconstructing public philosophy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-19 00:00:00 Daniel Pariseau Walkowitz does a beautiful job connecting formal readings and an attention to style with a broader interest in ethics, affiliation, and reflection on how social categories are defined. She puts that broader interest under the heading of "critical cosmopolitanism," and she does an outstanding job aligning seemingly apolitical stances (Joyce's "trivialism," for example, or Woolf's "evasion") convincingly with political messages (escaping nationalism in favor of individualism, ducking propaganda with the help of nonsense). For me, the early chapters of the book (Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce) were far more convincing and effective, though this may be because I was not as familiar with the primary texts in the second half of the book, which addresses contemporary writers Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald. Perhaps it is impossible to get as excited about nuanced formal readings of texts that you have not read or hardly remember. That being said, I thought the categories Walkowitz assigned to these writers ("treason," "mix-ups," "vertigo") were less convincing and evident than the stylistic categories that she assigned to the earlier modernists. Sometimes it seemed like she had to stretch those categorical words with a great deal of strain to get the meaning that she wanted out of them. This reminded me of advice I got from a graduate school mentor not to fetishize a single word in critical work, and here I see why that might be problematic. The critic repeating the thematic word sometimes prompts my readerly skepticism about the argument, while without the key word, I might have been able to get into the flow a bit more. Still, I loved the early chapters and especially her reading of "The Two Gallants" by Joyce, which I have taught and enjoyed teaching.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-02 00:00:00 Sunwoo Hwang I don't know enough about the scholarly debate over the term cosmopolitan to weigh in on that part of the debate, but Walkowitz's overall framing of cosmopolitan style in relation to modernism and close reading of works by the authors she associates with this style -- Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Ishiguro, Rushdie, and Sebald -- is well done and illuminating.