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Mourning Modernity is a timely reminder of the complexities of literary production in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Seth Moglen's primary argument is that “American literary modernism is, at heart, an effort to mourn the destructive effects of modern capitalism - and to mourn, most of all, for the crisis of alienation” (pp xiii-xiv). Such a firm premise could have led to a rather facile study. Yet what is most admirable about Moglen's book is its refusal of tidy categorization. Ultimately, what Moglen demonstrates is “an encounter between melancholia and mourning” (p xiv): an examination of mourning and melancholia not just as terminal explanations, but as sites that intersect and overlap on a politically influenced psychic continuum.
The book is divided into two large parts, for a total of six chapters and a concluding essay. The first part of the book is devoted to elaborating the political connections between mourning, melancholia, and literary production. Moglen groups his archive roughly: there are texts that meander in melancholy, and those that mourn. His “melancholic moderns” include canonical authors such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Willa Cather and Jean Toomer. Taking Gertrude Stein at her word, Moglen insists “that these men and women had lost so much that they felt themselves to be lost…” (p 3) and that their major works suffer from “a crisis in the possibility of love” (p 5). As in classic melancholia, there appears to be no desire to overcome such a crisis. If anything, Moglen argues “that price is paid partly in the suffering that follows from the displacement of anger as self-beratement. …it contributes to the racism, misogyny, and homophobia that are so commonly enacted in melancholic modernism” (p 39).
Moglen is far more appreciative of his gathering of texts that mourn: this group of authors includes H.D., Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Tillie Olsen, and Willi