Mourning Modernity

by Moglen, Seth

• ISBN13: 9780804754194
• ISBN10: 0804754195
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-22
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

InMourning Modernity, Seth Moglen argues that American literary modernism is, at its heart, an effort to mourn for the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism. He demonstrates that the most celebrated literary movement of the 20th century is structured by a deep conflict between political hope and despairbetween the fear that alienation and exploitation were irresistible facts of life and the yearning for a more just and liberated society. He traces this conflict in the works of a dozen novelists and poets ranging from Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Hurston, Hughes, and Tillie Olsen. Taking John Dos Passos' neglectedU.S.A. trilogy as a central case study, he demonstrates how the struggle between reparative social mourning and melancholic despair shaped the literary strategies of a major modernist writer and the political fate of the American Left.Mourning Modernityoffers a bold new map of the modernist tradition, as well as an important contribution to the cultural history of American radicalism and to contemporary theoretical debates about mourning and trauma.

Author Biography

Seth Moglen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Lehigh University. He has recently published a new edition of T. Thomas Fortune's Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (2007).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. xiii
The Two Modernisms
Modernism and Loss: The Divided Response to American Capitalism	p. 3
Melancholic Modernism	p. 27
The Modernism of Mourning	p. 45
The Two Modernisms at War: Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy
John Dos Passos and the Crises of American Radicalism, 1916-1936	p. 95
The Modernism of Mourning in USA.: "Writing So Fiery and Accurate"	p. 123
Melancholic Modernism in U.S.A.: Naturalism and the "Torment of Hope"	p. 175
Conclusion: "The Language of the Beaten Nation Is Not Forgotten" -Dos Passos's Camera Eye and the Unfinished Work of Mourning	p. 219
Notes	p. 235
Works Cited	p. 291
Index	p. 305
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