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

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. Mourning Modernityprovides critics with a powerful and clarifying set of descriptors for American modernism. Mourning Modernityopens the door to reconsidering Luk?c's categories outside of his problematic formal absolution, with an eye to the variety of affective modes that historical self-awareness can take. This is no small achievement, and offers a key vantage on the constitution of America's resentment-filled present. 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. 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.Seth Moglen is AssoclsÄ