Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American CapitalismIn Mourning 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 despair between 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' neglected U.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 Modernity offers 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. |
Contents
Melancholic Modernism | 27 |
The Modernism of Mourning | 45 |
The Modernism of Mourning in U S A | 123 |
Melancholic Modernism in U S A | 175 |
Is Not ForgottenDos Passoss Camera | 219 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African American aggression alienation ambivalence American radicalism anger anticapitalism anticapitalist aspirations Camera Eye canon capacity capitalism capitalist Cather characters commitment crisis critics cultural Debs Debs's desire destructive disappointment dynamics economic Edmund Wilson effort Eliot emphasizes enables enacted example experience exploitation explore expression Faulkner feeling fictional Fitzgerald forms fraternal Freud Gatsby grief grieving Hemingway Hughes's human Hurston imagine impulse intellectual Janie John Dos Passos labor Langston Hughes Left libidinal literary Literature loss lost male Mary melancholia memory misanthropy misogyny modernist narratives nature novel object Olsen particular Passos's persistently political mourning prose poems psychic radical biographies radical movement Red Scare represents revolutionary Sacco and Vanzetti sexual social injury socialist society solidarity story lines strategies structure struggle Sun Also Rises Tillie Olsen tion Toomer's tradition trauma trilogy U.S.A. trilogy Veblen William Carlos William Carlos Williams women working-class writers yearnings Yonnondio York