Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds by Ada Smailbegović (review)

217 Diplomacy and the Modern Novel. In fact, such interaction often feels strangely ancillary to the arguments here. Rather, the diachronic limning of the relations between author and diplomat, with its emphasis on the mutation of euphemism and routine, threatens to be subsumed into more familiar accounts of modern professionalization and the shifting affect of manners and bureaucracy in the wake of World War I. On one hand, this bespeaks the value of the volume in complementing recent work on modernist institutions, such as that of Greg Barnhisel. But on the other, it underscores the extent to which diplomacy’s very nature is to minimize the disorientation of the exchanges it mediates—perhaps the sticking point in any easy analogy between diplomacy and modernist authorship.