Mourning Modernity

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] CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE. THE TWO MODERNISMS 1. Modernism and Loss: The Divided Response to American Capitalism 2.Melancholic Modernism 3. The Modernism of Mourning PART TWO.THE TWO MODERNISMS AT WAR: DOS PASSOS'S U.S.A.TRILOGY 4. John Dos Passos and the Crises of American Radicalism 5. The Modernism of Mourning in U.S.A.: "Writing So Fiery and Accurate" 6. Melancholic Modernism in U.S.A.: Naturalism and the "Torment of Hope" Conclusion. "The Language of the Beaten Nation Is Not Forgotten": Dos Passos's Camera Eye and the Unfinished Work of Mourning Notes Works Cited Index

"Mourning Modernity provides critics with a powerful and clarifying set of descriptors for American modernism." - American Literature "Mourning Modernity opens the door to reconsidering Lukác'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." (Evan Mauro, Reviews in Cultural Theory ) "Seth Moglen's Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuires of American Capitalism is a powerful volume offering breathtakingly sweeping claims about the span of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century." - David M. Ball (College Literature) "Mourning Modernity is a groundbreaking contribution to the discourse on literary modernism." - Fred Moten (University of Southern California) "Mourning Modernity transforms 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." - Modernism/Modernity "In Mourning Modernity, Seth Moglen combines a brilliant analysis of literary modernism with extraordinary insights into U.S. political culture. We will never be able to write about modernism again without taking into account Moglen's compelling arguments about the distinction between literary works that aestheticize alienation and those that call for remaking the social order." - George Lipsitz (University of California at Santa Barbara)