Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation
Lecia Rosenthal
Abstract
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussion ... More
Keywords: catastrophe, mass death, collective loss, world-ending, trauma, sublime, modernism, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 | Print ISBN-13: 9780823233977 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: September 2011 | DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.001.0001 |
