Mourning Modernity Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism [Hardcover]

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.In Mourning Modernity, Seth Moglen offers a bold new map of American literary modernism as a psychologically and politically divided response to the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism. Mourning Modernityis a groundbreaking contribution to the discourse on literary modernism. Seth Moglen'sMourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuires of American Capitalismis a powerful volume offering breathtakingly sweeping claims about the span of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Mourning Modernitytransforms in a stroke what we thought we knew about U.S. modernism...We should be thankful that Moglen has both charted this exciting new terrain and left some work for the rest of us to do. InMourning Modernity, Seth Moglen combines a brilliant analysis of literary modernism with extraordinary insights into U.S. political cullsn