Mourning Modernity
Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism
In 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.
Seth Moglen
is Professor of English, American Studies, and Africana Studies at Lehigh University. He has published an edition of T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, a neglected masterpiece of the African American freedom struggle. His first play, Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia was produced by Touchstone Theatre and then broadcast in the United States on PBS. He is at work on an experimental book that employs modernist literary strategies to explore the history of one iconic city, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from its 18th -century founding to its post-industrial present.
