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  • Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism
  • Janet Galligani Casey and Greg Forter
Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. Seth Moglen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii + 324. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

We received an unusually high degree of interest in Mourning Modernity. For this reason, we have decided to print two responses to Moglen's monograph.

Reviewed by Janet Galligani Casey, Skidmore College

If recent, robust reassessments of literary modernism have achieved anything, surely they have made us skeptical of the reduction of this vast aesthetic landscape to a single explanatory logic. The proliferation of approaches and theories, texts and contexts, that has defined modernist studies of late makes immediately questionable a sweeping division of American literary modernism into two basic sensibilities—two means of responding, as Seth Moglen would have it, to the crises engendered by capitalism. In his view, both individual texts and the canon as a whole plot a spectrum between merely aestheticizing cultural injury and exploiting it as the basis for effecting a new social vision. That Moglen makes this theory seem, against our better judgment, not only plausible but compelling is the measure of his success.

The "two modernisms" of Moglen's scheme are melancholic modernism, which fetishizes cultural loss and presents for our contemplation an exquisitely honed grief, and the modernism of mourning, which works through grief by naming specific sources of oppression (notably the disaffecting processes of modernity) and positing an alternative social order that signals hope. While Moglen insists that these two modernisms do not map neatly on to the distinctions between bourgeois and radical writers, or between white writers and those from minority groups, and while he goes to some length to demonstrate the combination of the two modernisms within individual texts, it is difficult to resist the broad equation of the melancholic with high modernism, and of mourning with works of social resistance—as even the author seems to concede. One strength of the project, then, is that it offers a new way to conceptualize the relationship between high modernism on the one hand and the modernisms of "subordinated social groups" (11) on the other. If American modernism is indeed "a cultural formation structured by an argument about modern capitalism and the alienation it has produced" (89), then its two different modes begin, intriguingly, from the same cultural vantage point; the resulting comparison yields considerable insight. Using Freudian theory on grieving to establish the necessary theoretical framework, Moglen rather quickly renders the "literature of despair" (melancholia) as the less interesting category, an emphasis for which his title prepares us. The modernism of mourning, which acknowledges despair but also challenges it by reaching for a radically revised vision of social justice, is the book's more fundamental topic, and a rewarding one.

The argument comes alive in the interrogation of actual texts. While all of the works discussed evince strains of both types of modernism, each one, according to Moglen, tends toward a particular pole, and the resulting readings are surprisingly penetrating. The book's first section, which sets up the basic terms of the debate, offers provocative considerations of works by writers ranging from Eliot and Hemingway (melancholics, to be sure) to H. D., Tillie Olsen, and Langston [End Page 441] Hughes (mourners all). William Carlos Williams, described as a "troubling" presence within the traditional (i.e., high) modernist canon, achieves new dimensionality through Moglen's reading of "The Descent," a poem that positions Williams within the mourning camp and productively complicates our sense of his oeuvre. That Moglen is able to illuminate such different texts and differently situated writers speaks to the rich possibilities of his approach, and indeed, to the elucidative power of a perspective that initially appears overly schematic.

It is the second (and longer) section of the book, however, that gives full play to Moglen's ideas. This section is devoted entirely to a discussion of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, a brilliant move and one that is fully justified by both the richness of the work itself and by its author's complicated political stances. Even if Moglen's...

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