Date of Award
2015
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Greg Forter
Second Advisor
Brian Glavey
Abstract
Published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio engages in the modernist project of collective grieving for social losses. This thesis looks specifically to Seth Moglen’s Mourning Modernity, in which he articulates the various grieving strategies, mourning and melancholia, employed by modernists in order to process their rapidly changing world. I explore the various ways that “Godliness,” one of Anderson’s stories in Winesburg, engages in both mourning and melancholia, and I draw on Ruth Levitas’ notion of secular grace, from her book Utopia as Method, in order to suggest that modernist subjects need a form of secular grace in order to mourn effectively.
Rights
© 2015, Victoria Chandler
Recommended Citation
Chandler, V.(2015). Mourning, Melancholia, and the Need for Grace in Sherwood Anderson's "Godliness". (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3121