The Cultures of Modernism

TLDR: In this article, a comparative study of Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf that describes melancholia as a sort of transnational culture of modernism is presented, and Bahun argues that modernist fiction engages in what she calls "countermourning" which resists the therapeutic settlement of Freud's concept of mourning.

Abstract: T.S. Eliot’s 1948 essay, Notes toward the Definition of Culture , gives voice to modernist anxieties about culture in its regional, national, and international settings. Local affiliations, a regionally inflected patriotism, and European cosmopolitanism compose Eliot’s heterogeneous and porous cultures of modernism. The text exemplifies the intellectual history of the early twentieth century, as recent scholarly contributions suggest. In Regional Modernisms , editors Neal Alexander and James Moran explore local allegiances and regional loyalties in the British context. The essays in the collection shift the attention away from the cosmopolitan perspectives of metropolitan centers to local concerns, showing how this regionalism did not necessarily mean a retreat to a provincial outlook. Eric Aronoff’s Composing Cultures contends that the notion of culture was central to American modernism, and that an interdisciplinary debate surrounding the definition of culture informed the emergence of American Studies as an academic field of inquiry. Modernism and Melancholia by Sanja Bahun is a comparative study of Andrei Bely, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf that describes melancholia as a sort of transnational culture of modernism. Examining a multilingual canon of writers, Bahun argues that modernist fiction engages in what she calls “countermourning,” an aesthetic performance that resists the therapeutic settlement of Freud’s concept of mourning. This body of scholarship studies the ideological complexities surrounding conceptions of culture, illustrating the aesthetic and political strategies of literary modernism.