Review Article Biedermeier Postmodernism? Christian Moraru University of North Carolina, Greensboro

404 Nemoianu, Virgil. Postmodernism & Cultural Identities: Conflicts and Coexistence. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 2010. 392 + xii pp. ISBN 978-0-8132-1684-3 (cloth).

Chances are some readers will be thrown off by the title of Virgil Nemoianu’s latest book. For, truth be told, Postmodernism & Cultural Identities: Conflicts and Coexistence does not exactly offer yet another inquiry into that old postmodern chestnut. In fact, strictly speaking, Nemoianu is not a student of postmodernism either, and he is even less a postmodern scholar in the narrow (“committed”) sense in which some of us specializing in the field also uphold the worldview, aesthetics, or political agenda ordinarily associated with our subject. One of the most respected and distinguished comparatists of his generation, Nemoianu has been known chiefly for landmark contributions to a more nuanced understanding of late or, as he puts it somewhere, “toned-down” Romanticism-the Romanticism and, more broadly, the European culture of the “Biedermeier era.” The award-winning monograph The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature in the Age of Biedermeier (1984), pos- sibly his most important work thus far, has been nothing short of trailblazing. The Triumph of Imperfection: The Silver Age of Sociocultural Moderation in Europe, 1815- 1848 (2006) is its belated and no less intriguing sequel. Carrying the discussion into modernism, the 1989 volume A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress, and Reaction marks an ambitious and controversial attempt to work out an alternative model of socioliterary evolution, which deems literature instrumental to overall progress yet delinks innovation in literature, the arts, and the humanities from radi- cal and generally left-wing politics. Reframed according to this model, “progress” is articulated in terms of an evenly operating Enlightenment rationality able to check

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée crcl september 2011 septembre rclc 0319–051x/11/38.3/404 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association Christian Moraru | Biedermeier Postmodernism? itself, correct its epistemological and historical excesses, and consequently fashion history as a smooth narrative where dialectical synthesis, cohesion, unbroken flow, and ensuing stability trump hiatus, conflict, and violent change. Within this frame- work, “reaction” (complete with its infamous “reactionaries”), conservatism, and the political right-which Nemoianu never tires of distinguishing from the far right- have a role to play, and, he insists repeatedly, they have played it more emphatically than most contemporary literary-cultural historians and critics would allow. On this ground, the “new” in the arts and beyond proves neither external nor antithetical to the time-honored economy of tradition. Quite the contrary. As Nemoianu has con- tended throughout his career, tradition-tradition in a classical or neoclassical sense, more accurately-provides, conspicuously or less so, the glue of the historical mosaic, steadily recycling itself into novel, aesthetic and sociopolitical formations; at the very least, it is not incompatible with them. Moreover, the critic argues, uninhibited research has shown that “classical” and “conservative” philosophy, theology, cultural practices, and the Western institutions built on them-with the Catholic Church as 405 a prime example-have laid the groundwork for progressive developments and in a surprising number of cases have done a better job of defending human rights and freedoms than the political movements, organizations, and ideologies that usually take credit for it. Reenacted unapologetically in several other monographs and edited collections on canonicity and the intra-/extra-literary function of the aesthetic, the idiosyn- cratic decoupling of sociocultural advancement and the radical liberalism under whose banner modern Western society is said to forge ahead has become the signa- ture move of a polymath comparatist who pulls no punches. Adequately historicized, impeccably informed, Nemoianu’s modus operandi might be called revisionist by some and counter-revisionist by others, but that depends, of course, on how you see the North American “academic dominant.” As to how the author himself views it, in his previous works and in Postmodernism & Cultural Identities once again, there surely are no two ways about it. In his opinion, we have got, across the humani- ties, a critical and political dogmatic “mainstream,” even though-and this too needs to be recognized-said mainstream is basically cut off from and outplayed by the cultural-political forces prevailing outside the academy. Inside it, though, this criti- cal trend or whatever you might call it works “hegemonically,” making as it does, stresses Nemoianu, for a cynically uncritical if loose consensus of method, jargon, perspective, and social platform geared toward delegitimizing alternate definitions and protocols of culture, value, canon, literary form, interpretation, aesthetics, and politics. References to “the hegemonic intellectual classes” (183), “the critical/ideo- logical hegemonic community” (214), and the like are never in short supply in a book that, it becomes obvious right off the bat, has some big axes to grind and makes no bones about it. Nor does its preface mince words about such polemical ends: “I will declare immediately,” states Nemoianu, “that this book is both defensive, [sic] and challenging toward conventional wisdom. Many positions generally accepted by our crcl september 2011 septembre rclc

contemporaries are presented [in Postmodernism & Cultural Identities] as erroneous, sometimes nonsensical, or even mendacious. We are [sic] trying to cast a cooler look at the evolution of history and the meaning of culture, with or without the pretention and hope to come up with a solution to the general sociocultural crisis or ferment and to counteract decisively the positions of the hegemonic intellectuals of our time” (vii). The fuzziness of the last sentence aside, Nemoianu implies, and occasionally says it out loud, that, to the extent they have added interpretive insult to historical injury, those intellectuals are to blame for the crisis to no small degree. But who are they, one might ask first? And, next, what kind of crisis are we talking about? On the former question, the critic is less specific than one would expect. However, an allusion here, a quick jab at Fredric Jameson there, a disparaging gloss to Foucauldian historicism and its New Historicist afterlife a bit later, a reference to “hard-left” ideologues such as “Thomas sic[ ] Eagleton, Alain Badiou, François [sic] Lyotard, and Slavoj Žižek” (118), then the provocative and refreshing comparison of Dilthey and Nietzsche in 406 Part 2 (214-216) help ID the villains. The reaction to Nietzsche in particular goes a long way toward clarifying things: the current scholarly hegemony in the American humanities in general and in literary studies in particular, we gather, is, in a nut- shell, the unholy progeny of “the French Nietzsche” (215) insofar as this Nietzsche, we also learn, is ultimately responsible for the dogmatic conceptualization of society as politically saturated, repressive-disciplinary, and conflictual space and, in relation to this dogma, for the representation and analysis of culture as a “rhizomic” field of warring forces and site of tension, contestation, and agonal revaluations of all values. Colored by a late Marxism that has not even bothered to reconstruct itself despite the momentous bankruptcy of its Central and East European historical embodiments, this Nietzscheanism undergirds, indeed, most if not all of the reigning orientations in humanistic scholarship since poststructuralism. The U.S. New Historicists, cul- tural materialists, postcolonialists, globalization scholars such as Hardt and Negri, the army of critics active in identity studies’ race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, or (dis)ability subdivisions and in the related, “culture wars” and canon skirmishes have all been influenced by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and later by “Left Heideggerians” like “Jean Luc [sic] Nancy and Luc Ferry” (317), and in that carry on Nietzschean “nihilism” one way or the other. Is this bird’s-eye view of today’s American criticism and theory fair? If it is-and even if it is not-is it fair to Nietzsche in the first place? I am pretty sure many of us would take issue with either account. At any rate, the bottom line is, to me at least, that the great precursor of us all presents a more complex case. Worth mentioning here is his quasi-mysticism of form, his deeply held belief that grammar and verbal structure in general say everything about content and so, in and of themselves, put forth a whole philosophy. In fairness to Nemoianu’s description itself now, it finds fault principally with Nietzsche’s “reception” (214) more than with the thinker him- self. And I do take the critic’s point that the reception in question has been somewhat skewed, more precisely, has given pride of place to a certain Nietzsche, the one that Christian Moraru | Biedermeier Postmodernism? has sponsored intellectually the “indiscriminate” revisionism fueling a great deal of the conversation in the U.S. academy. I am also willing to concede that, ironi- cally enough, this revisionism oftentimes looks like an orthodoxy of (un)reasoning, theme, and lingo, that too many of our books and articles sound the same, chase their own tails as they reach the same foregone conclusions, revolve around the same issues, and rehash the same, annoyingly self-righteous rhetoric over and over again (and then some more). Granted, there has been a disconnect of sorts in post-1960s scholarship, whose endeavors have been for the most part keyed to diversifying our fields, curricula, and hermeneutical procedures (or so we have professed) while at least some of its outcomes do appear to betoken sameness of design and allegiance, which in turn may have had homogenizing as well as hegemonic consequences. If this is true, completely or even in part, then I think Nemoianu’s stance is worth paying attention to, for it supplies a necessary corrective. But if the hegemony he is talking about is so entrenched as he claims it is, his critique will in all likelihood be taken as another conservative backlash and either dismissed offhand or ignored. 407 Should this happen, would it take him by surprise? I doubt it. Alongside his ear- lier books and essays, Postmodernism & Cultural Identities sketches the portrait of a tough but solitary campaigner, a dissenter who valiantly parts company with a whole, oxymoronic hegemony of self-styled dissent, and who, accordingly, does not back away from an unzeitgemäss, definitely uphill battle. More than the involuntary Nietzscheanism of this posture, what bears acknowledging is that the 2010 book is indeed an uphill battle if there ever was one. Again, the author stands pretty much alone in this fight. This is not because he is the only one who has couched his discon- tent with our time’s academic state of affairs in these resolute terms but because many of the more established allies he rustles up in the book, from great philosophers like Levinas and Charles Taylor-whose “ethics of authenticity,” incidentally, rests on a typically postmodern premise-to “posthumanist” critics of digital culture such as N. Katherine Hayles, are incompatible neither with postmodernity as a sociocultural moment or crisis nor with postmodernism as a critical paradigm. This may well be the bigger problem throughout, possibly the problem of or, better yet, with Nemoianu’s pivotal contention. It is, very briefly, the problem of pre- sentation, namely, of how he sets up postmodernity and postmodernism and not necessarily of how they have been playing out artistically, politically, and histori- cally. It is not so much that the author “needs” the postmodern to be or be seen as the historical, institutional, and socio-epistemological problem or crisis Postmodernism & Cultural Identities purports so “solve” either. But the history of the book itself, dis- closed in the “History of the Chapters” placed after the preface (xi-xii), bears out my initial misgivings about Nemoianu’s actual subject. What becomes apparent there and gets corroborated throughout is that postmodernism and its thorny problemat- ics are more of an afterthought. The bulk of the debate of postmodern issues-and a very general debate at that-takes place in the first two chapters. Otherwise, for the most part, the volume gathers articles and talks published or delivered over the crcl september 2011 septembre rclc

past decade. Originally, these bits and pieces did not have a lot to do either with one another or with postmodernism per se, which becomes even more evident in the “applications” on the classics’ imitation, Ludwig Ganghofer, and Ernest Jünger from Part 3. Nor have the earlier lectures and articles been reworked sufficiently so as to adjust the saliently oral rhetoric, the didactic tone, the scarcity of evidence, the blanket statements, and the frequently occasional nature of most featured texts, and thus render Postmodernism & Cultural Identities a less heteroclite and more book- like assemblage in the bargain. No question about it: while the initial material has been tweaked here and there, the volume could have done with superior revision and editing (and copyediting). It could have used some reorganizing and expanding of the pre-existing fragments with an eye to stepping beyond the pro domo and the apodictic into the dialogical and the deliberative by engaging patiently with “actually existing” postmodern theory and scholarship across chapters. Absent such a revi- sion, this engagement remains tangential except, as noted, in the opening sections. 408 Those were added later in hopes to weave together and frame a set of discussions that, as it turns out, attend to the advertised questions rather obliquely and generally and dwell on specifically postmodern issues, authors, and works with a consistency that fits the bill even less. Critically speaking, what happens in Postmodernism & Cultural Identities is by no means isolated and indirectly bears witness to the ongoing, paramount impact of the postmodern across fields andoutside postmodern scholarship proper: along these lines, it is routinely assumed that we are living in a postmodern age (postmo- dernity), that there is something characteristic of this age, and that this something (postmodernism) inheres in a certain modality of grasping culture, society, the human, and their representation. The postmodern is thus understood more or less as synonymous to or as a sociocultural dominant within the contemporary. Either way, it makes it easier for those of us disgruntled with what has been going on inside and outside the profession since the 1960s to give thumbs-down to the present without rejecting it in toto or under its actual name. Theoretically and historically, the post- modern is then, here as elsewhere, a default framework, and a convenient one, too. Notoriously slippery, the term does allow and has allowed for tactical manipulations and wildly discrepant constructions within English studies, let alone from one dis- cipline to another. This has not quite helped foster dialogue across fields-consider, for instance, how differently historians and literature critics view the concept, not to mention that many of those using it in literary-cultural criticism, theory, and phi- losophy, including big names from Baudrillard to Žižek, employ it as a rhetorical ploy, a conceptual straw man whose meaning, presumably negative, is self-evident. For the other and even less helpful assumption in play in this kind of handling of the topic—which treatment, as one can see, makes strange bedfellows-is that the critical deployment of postmodernity as a “historical condition” and of post- modernism as this condition’s cultural poetics and politics (13) can dispense with a definition, however provisional that may be. The presumption is that they entail Christian Moraru | Biedermeier Postmodernism? or designate this or that, which, among other things, is the case of postmodernism’s putative “relativism,” an annoying cliché Nemoianu himself rehashes across the book. To his credit, though, the first twenty pages, mainly the second chapter, “Does Postmodernism Have a Substance?” make a bona-fide effort to lay out, if apparently at odds with the chapter title, the basic features of “postmodernity.” These include: the “centrality” of communication and mobility of people, values, and data; the ger- mane, networked and “postindustrial” stage of society and the momentous advent of knowledge economy in the West, primarily in the U.S.; the birth of virtual space and overall computer technology-shaped communities, which are challenging head-on the Gemeinschaft makeup of traditional collectivities; the “modification of gender relationship[s]”; “[the] tension between globalism and multiculturalism”; the move away from Cold War “bipolarities” to a more complex and fragmented field of tensions and oppositions in world politics; “[t]he rise” of the oft-invoked “relativism and skep- ticism to the level of a guiding doctrine”-“[v]irtually all values,” Nemoianu goes on to elaborate here, “are placed under interrogation and under doubt. Macronarratives 409 tend to disappear, and, by and large,” as we have noticed, “the principles of Nietzsche replace those of Aristotle and Hegel, of Marx and of St. Thomas Aquinas for the intellectuals shaping the conscience of majorities”; hence trait number seven: “self- consciousness and self-analysis” are now getting the upper hand over “innocence and spontaneity”; on the upswing also are-under item number eight, which belabors number six-“relativization and questionableness of the past and of memory, primar- ily through irony and parody,” under whose eroding sway “continuity is denied,” so much so that “history is a parodic game,” “[h]istorical blocks are juxtaposed incon- gruously,” and rupture, discontinuity, and the heterogeneous prevail”; and last, the “stylistic” of religion shifts away from the “dogmatic/theological” and Christianity to forms and faiths increasingly centered around the mystical, Islam, and formerly peripheral spiritualities (13-17). A microcosm of the book itself, the laundry list is a mixed bag in more ways than one. It goes without saying, postmodernism itself is reputedly so, an unyielding and befuddling mixtum compositum. Yet again, there is postmodernism’s built-in philo- sophical-stylistic mix, and then there is the critical mix-up further muddling things up. To exemplify succinctly, what the critic describes above pertains both to post- modernity and postmodernism, the earlier distinction notwithstanding (13). Also, as the succinct comment of modernity on p. 24 attests, the big “problem” or “crisis” Nemoianu draws our attention to can be traced in all actuality back to modernity and is, if anything, modernity’s predicament and in that a post-traditional rather than a postmodern “situation,” one that originated and was compounded at various junc- tures in our post-Enlightenment history. In the same vein, another distinction that ought to be made here is between globalization (“globalism”), on the one hand, and modernity and postmodernity on the other-as far as the latter goes, this is not, as the author leads the reader to infer early on, equivalent to “globalism,” nor is globalism- no matter how “quickly” you have to say it-simply “centralistic and universalistic” crcl september 2011 septembre rclc

(14). Likewise, while Nemoianu aptly underscores the postmodern departure from modernity’s political-aesthetic binaries, postmodernity surely predates the post- Cold War period in which the modern logic of separateness and disjunction takes a back seat more conspicuously than ever before. Admittedly, all this is awfully intricate and contentious stuff. Gargantuan bibliog- raphies have been devoted to sorting it out. It is also true that the conclusions have varied widely. But is this license to disregard the scholarship on the subject altogether? Methinks not. I will mention here only the sustained albeit somewhat marginal, “cul- turalist” struggle within global studies to supply an account of globalization that registers the homogenizing as well as the diversifying, hybridity-oriented, and poten- tially empowering thrust of global phenomena-with another irony, some of the “hegemonic” intellectuals (e. g., Jameson) also choose to turn a blind eye to the latter. In effect, if the global is quintessentially post-diasporic, that is, if it sponsors-as I think it does-a planetary condition of generalized displacement, barter, and quasi- 410 ecumenical diaspora, then in the long run it may just provide the right geocultural context for a “genuine” multiculturalism, one capable of moving, inter- and cross- culturally, beyond the plethora of “essentialist” separatisms that have been jockeying for recognition over the four decades or so. On the other hand, when, later in the book, postmodernity is redefined as a broader, historical stage for the clash of cen- tripetal globalization and centrifugal multiculturalism (143), the same reader learns that globalization and postmodernity are not quite interchangeable either-and the confusion is hardly dispelled later on in Part 2, when postmodernity is defined con- currently as a “synonym” of globalization (242), as its subset or “variant” (244), and as its counterbalance (244). Accordingly, the question or questions are: What is the larger category here, globalization (an era? a phenomenon?) or postmodernity? Is globalization postmodernizing under our eyes-hence “postmodern globalization” (243)-or, vice versa, is postmodernity going global? And is this postmodernity solely a time period, or is it an “identity” protocol, as implied on p. 244? With each chap- ter, the answers get less and less coherent as they drift father and farther away from the initial point on postmodernity as overarching cultural-historical moment inside which the globalizing and multicultural processes alike have yielded both positive and negative results (15). Although unspectacular, this last notion would point, I suppose, to a reason- able conclusion if it were not for the overall, broad-brushstroke picture that obtains incrementally, chapter by chapter, and which is out of synch with such a balanced assessment. While postmodernism and multiculturalism-more specifically, the classical multiculturalism of the 1960s and 1970s-are hardly equivalent, the former ultimately appears to share, in Nemoianu’s judgment, the latter’s turbulent, chaotic- destructive drive. Once more, this pattern of inconsistency rears its head over the course of the argument. On p. 18, the critic makes the “crucial observation” that “Postmodernity is by no means a diabolical condition. It is merely a dangerous one.... It is important not to demonize postmodernity, but rather to learn how to deal with Christian Moraru | Biedermeier Postmodernism? it. What we have chosen as the subject of our book is a presentation of countervailing forces that persist inside and with postmodernity. This ought to be as clear as possible to the reader, despite an apparent depiction to the contrary in many chapters.” This may be clear now, in the opening of Part 1, but, as the critic himself seems to antici- pate, it is no longer so later. For the position papers and other highly “ideological” interventions dressed up as chapters of Postmodernism & Cultural Identities simply speak to the more political motivations and pugnacious fervors of other times, places, and undertakings and for this very reason decline to carry out the arguably sensible project “depicted” here. Nor is the comment on the alleged danger embodied by post- modernity in any way substantiated, here or elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the case can be made, and has been made, that postmodernity constitutes a step forward in a number of literary, sociocultural, and political directions. Yet, regrettably enough, Nemoianu does not draw from those who have written whole books to build such a case, which, I hasten to add, has been anything but “hegemonic.” Even less popular is the thesis that postmodernism does not “erase” history, which Nemoianu sets forth 411 in a very thoughtful paragraph (19). But he does not elaborate through references to (to say nothing of analyses of) primary or secondary sources that might back up the important point that the postmodern neither dehistoricizes nor composes the “pro- logue to the abolition of culture” (19), to “nothingness.” The critic knows full well, then, that this would be an untenable position. All the same, the so-called chapters turn around and adopt it strategically. The initial plan of spotting and countering “the deconstructive, relativistic, and straightly destructive tendencies existing inside a postmodernist [sic] environment” (317) is not carried through by cogent reasoning-once more, there are virtually no attempts to dwell on “hegemonic” academics, works, and their concrete involvement in the contro- versies around the canon, multiculturalism, comparative literature, and the other issues tackled in Part 2. I will even grant Nemoianu the right to his unflattering views of deconstruction and, presumably, poststructuralism, much though I dis- agree with him on this score, but the book does not flesh out what exactly he means by the postmodern kind he would settle for either. A less anarchic “whirlwind” of change perhaps (135)? A postmodernism less “turbulent,” “extreme,” or “radical” in its rhetoric and program? Not as “fragmenting” as it has been in its outcomes and more of an element of “serene” continuity or “flow of cultural history,” and thus dignified “object” of a “philosophy of culture” (17)? “Tamed” (“defanged,” without “legs,” unlike the famous vodka)? “Biedermeier” maybe? “Constructive” (instead of “deconstructive”)? “Non-relativistic”? “Foundational” or at least not incompatible with the theological-humanist tradition and the basic tenets of the Enlightenment as overviewed with impressive display of originality and erudition in sections i-viii of Part 1? “Capacious” and “tolerant”? “Hospitable” in the sense of the title of Nemoianu and Robert Royal’s 1991 critical anthology? There is actually a lot to be said about a hospitable, moreaccommodating postmod- ernism-and even a hospitable, and thus ethical, poststructuralism, à la Derrida’s Of crcl september 2011 septembre rclc

Hospitality-about its actual existence no less than about the need to reaffirm this presence in the face of violently resurgent antinomisms. But to actually say it per- suasively, one would have to do it methodically, to roll up one’s sleeves, get into the bibliographical pit, and actually wrestle with the problems at hand. Take, for exam- ple, humanism, including Catholic humanism in general and Nemoianu’s favorite authors in particular, from Hans Urs von Balthasar to George Weigel. This human- ism could have been easily set in fruitful dialogue with recent, arguably postmodern arguments on the human, human nature, human/inhuman agency (Bruno Latour, Hayles), much as a Jesuit thinker such as Teilhard de Chardin could have been placed in conversation with secular theorists of globalization. Or take religion, a leitmotif of the book’s diatribe against the current academic situation. There has been some very substantial work on religion and its place in postmodern society and philosophy (se Brian Ingraffia among others), but this work is never attended to. Or the excep- tionally important point on “subsidiarity” (72), whose postmodern analogies such 412 as the local, the micro, the rhizomic, the idiomatic, the individual, the different, and so forth are as striking as Nemoianu submits but, unfortunately, are left out. Or the reaction, in chapter xiii, against the “persecution”/marginalization of the aesthetic and the formal in today’s cultural-materialist-oriented North American academy: how about the renewed and widespread interest in both, especially in the area of “new aesthetics” and studies of affect? Elaine Scarry is just one of the more sono- rous names that come to mind on this score. Or the point, made in the next chapter, on the absence of a real “contradiction between multiculturalism and aesthetics,” that is, on how “any true multiculturalist education must be founded and grounded in aesthetics” (because, we are told, “an education based on ideological propaganda and materialist values leads inevitably to Eurocentrism and the suppression of oth- erness”) (222): why is it, I wonder, that Nemoianu does not use here-to bolster his argument if for no other reason-the work of an Americanist like Lou Freitas Caton, who has spent a lot of energy developing a “multiculturalist aesthetics”? Or, regard- ing comparative literature, declared focus of chapter ix, what about the field’s serious, epistemological and institutional crisis, the resulting “new comparative studies,” and how the evolving discipline has already taken up many of Nemoianu’s worries. Or, in chapter xv, which is concerned with the “conservative” penchant of the classics, ancient or modern, what about-be it only with respect to Shakespeare-the New Historicism’s even-handed, one might say disillusioned treatment of authorial poli- tics? Or, in regard to the equally notable considerations on cultural ecology (225-232): why, I must ask, is Nemoianu not spending here at least some of the live ammunition supplied by Kulturökologie or its U.S. version? On this and other themes, there is, I repeat, only scant engagement with work done by either Nemoianu’s actual “opponents” or by his potential allies. It seems to me, though, that professional deontology requires that, whether we like others or not, we give them a fair hearing. Naturally, Nemoianu can try and do without such minutia, but then he may get paid in kind and-apropos of the ecological consid- Christian Moraru | Biedermeier Postmodernism? erations above-his claim to his little “philosophical garden” amid the postmodern jungle may fall on deaf ears. As for one, the concept itself sounds a bit utopian to me, and literally so: in the growingly integrated, geo-academic environments of the twenty-first century, I can think of no place where we can isolate ourselves to cul- tivate our own gardens. Any (horti)cultural initiative of this sort, no matter how deliberately “oppositional,” how cloistral or monastic by design or intent, is bound to spill over into another territory, into other styles, players, cultures, and agendas. Any programmatically or declaratively small-scale critical-intellectual landscaping such as Nemoianu’s must encroach sooner or later on ampler globalscapes, as Arjun Appadurai calls them, on vaster spaces and venues of exchange, dialogue, and critical adjudication. And, my reservations on Postmodernism & Cultural Identities notwith- standing, this is what I hope will happen to Nemoianu’s book. I hope, that is, that readers, regardless of their own positions and allegiances, will go to the trouble of taking this impressively learned and bold book seriously. 413