(For information about Modernism/modernity clusters on the Print+ platform, please see https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/clusters.)

This cluster examines modernist elegy’s engagements with the ruptures and reinventions in the cultural work related to modern death. Wandering the affective edges of civic and religious life since the turn of the twentieth century, elegy has explored the new shapes of despair, hope, care, desire, and metaphysical bafflement at death that animated modern subjectivities. It did so in protean, globally mobile forms. Emerging literary histories of experimental grief-writing and memory-craft shed light on the expressive infrastructures that gathered, or imagined, counterpublics in the context of death and mourning, across many regions, languages, and traditions. These diverse literary histories contribute to critical studies of mortuary practices and political interpretations of dying and dead bodies. The modernity of elegy responds with unique force and feeling to the many ways, around the world, death and dead bodies have been modernized.

The study of global modernist elegy and grief writing supports ongoing, urgent struggles to articulate collective loss and perform public vigil. For this cluster, we invite contributions of 1000-3000 words about modernist elegy and public sphere theory, affect theory, migration studies, necropolitics, secularization studies, memory studies, and more. The study of elegy, and its cousin grief-genres, offers another opportunity to examine transnational cultural dynamics in art and literature. These exploratory essays can focus on a single text, historical event, commemorative act, or community; or may reflect more abstractly on the affects, political dynamics, metaphysical questions, or aesthetic pleasures associated with elegy. For example, contributions might examine the shifting category of grievable life; representations of precarity and care practices; rhetorical experiments in constructing posthumous personhood and other absentees, particularly with apostrophe, metaphor, and metonymy; interrogations of fungibility, social death, and states of exception; elegiac redistributions of the sensible; archival engagements and documentary poetics; anthropocenic vigil, dirge, lament, or mourning; and other topics. Recent critical touchstones include, among many others, Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (ed. Tiffany Austin el.al.). Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, and Journal of World Literature’s special issue on “Elegy Today: Resistance, Re-Mapping” (v. 8.1, 2023).

As this emerging conversation shows, reading modernist poetry in conjunction with critical death studies raises many questions. How does elegy help us conceptualize changing political economies of dying and corpse disposal? How does modernist elegy articulate liminal ontologies that resonate with emerging kinds of social and political critique? How does elegy mobilize reparative capacities in dispossessed or broken worlds? Who were modernist elegy’s publics, and how did elegy negotiate private and public spheres? We seek reflections on the many responses elegy offers to social crisis, including those associated with decolonization, ecological wounding, racial and caste oppression, gender and anti-queer violence, and other situations calling for resilience and repair. We hope that renewed critical conversation about modernist elegy and related expressive practices around grief and mortuary action will resonate across many research fields.

Please send inquiries to David Sherman, cluster editor, at davidsherman@brandeis.edu.