Modernist Elegy and Grief’s Counterpublics

The essays gathered in this cluster discover new ways to address intractable, interconnected problems at the heart of elegy studies. We approach this field of study now with several hopes, across different horizons: with the hope of better understanding how this writing about death mobilized agency during past waves of political violence, and how it might continue to do so in the present; with the desire to further amplify conversations about modernist literature into global frameworks, although so much of this work remains; and with an ambition to share new creative possibilities for reckoning with memory and forgetting within the time-baffling pressures of modernization. We also hope that the creative, expressive techniques in some of these essays, as they engage lived experience, open compelling approaches to our fields.

Scholars of elegy have long considered its rhetorical and lyrical techniques for shaping grief into intelligible mourning, as well as its ambivalence and (often melancholic) resistance to such consolatory grief-shaping. As a complement to this generally psychological and psychoanalytic rubric for understanding the work of elegy, scholars have also approached elegy as a unique historical discourse, a variation on historicism and related practices for knowing and constructing the past: elegy, in this sense, pressures historicism with the poetics of collective memory and public commemoration, particularly in contexts of mass violence, ecological crisis, and other traumatic experiences that strain representational protocols and aesthetic traditions. Elegies witness history, as well as (or, as a way to) work through specific grief. More recently, scholars have contributed a rich body of thought about elegy’s canny sociality: its solidarity-building functions in the face of loss, reflections on power and justice, and capacities to form publics and counterpublics. This cluster contributes to elegy studies several nuanced attempts to make salient and productive the inextricability of elegy’s psychological, historicist, and political dimensions in modernizing social worlds.[1]

Elegy’s confrontations with modernity make it particularly strange and beautiful: dying modern (Diana Fuss’s apt phrase) deforms traditional cultural forms for communal resilience amidst death.[2] Modernist and contemporary elegies, in their experimental searching, index the ruptures and reinventions in the cultural work of death in rapidly modernizing societies. The modernization of dying bodies, corpses, and mortuary practices—their increasing medicalization, commodification, state regulation, sequestration, and other measures for making death practices subject to the institutions and technical expertise that render persons fungible and disposable—strained the ethical practice of caring for the dead and solicited aesthetic responses to a fundamental human longing. Elegy scholars have sought to understand this poetry as a symbolic practice for tending to the dead, for articulating a robust mortuary imaginary, in the face of this ongoing and often brutal sea-change.[3]

These essays have been written in an extended moment of accumulating political and humanitarian crises, as violence looms as the dominant social grammar in larger public spheres, and particularly military-state violence. We explore elegy as a reparative force for our struggles, an imaginative resource for resilience in precarity and for binding generations across time. Why does eloquence or art matter in the face of widespread loss and ungrieved death? But something in the question answers itself: each of these essays articulates a vision and value for lyric resistance to isolated, unacknowledged despair. Even if obliquely, each essay can be connected to contemporary scenes of violent death and mass, extra-judicial detentions of the living. Or to recent scenes, now so widely disavowed, of pandemic death. In the face of catastrophe, why elegy?

The recurring themes in this cluster include the racial politics of grief and hybrid articulations of Black mourning; our attenuated faculties for attending to the dead within new political economies of attention; the cultural force of literary and artistic coteries, in their unique temporalities and strained relations to institutions; entanglements of the human and non-human in forms of existential accompaniment and grievability that challenge social legibility; and revisionary possibilities among unexpected literary inheritances, in modernism and its legacies. All of these essays dwell with the nuanced aesthetic experience involved in modern grief-writing, through vivid examples; several also inhabit the ironic limit-points of elegy as both a poetic practice and critical object. This is a cluster, finally, about how modernist and contemporary literary experiments draw on elegiac traditions to mobilize world-making creativity in the face of necropolitical violence and attenuated mortuary agency.

Elegy has remained a distinctive practice of bearing witness and cultivating affective solidarity against social and biological death in its modern regimes. I think of elegy, simply, as the action of grasping for the dead against their oblivion or erasure with fragile contrivances of language. We might think, as figures for elegy itself, of Odysseus in Hades trying three times to embrace his mother’s ghost, failing each time, her form “sifting away / like a shadow, dissolving like a dream,” or think of Mr. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse reaching for Mrs. Ramsay, who is no longer there, he is “stumbling along a passage, stretch[ing] his arms out one dark morning,” but his arms remain empty, and we might think of these images as the simultaneous futility and necessity of our ongoing aesthetic negotiations with absence.[4] As you may find in the following essays, elegy’s task—to hold absence, complicate silence, re-conjugate another’s non-being—is occasionally replicated, in some displacement or sublimation, in elegy scholarship: our ongoing attempts to critically grasp its force also bear lack or ache, marks of irresolvable negotiations, in our varying conceptual registers. Thinking elegy is hard; it is a critical negotiation with loss through aesthetic ciphers for our struggles with memory and forgetting. Each essay gathered here offers a distinct approach to identifying what modernist and contemporary elegies demand of us—the particular attunements they solicit to the past, to justice, to species-otherness, to ephemeral friendships, to our own faculties of attention, and to the irony that reverberates within so much modern elegiac discourse.