Spring 2013 Catalog - Duke University Press

Dying Modern
A Meditation on Elegy
diana fuss
POETRY/LITERARY CRITICISM
general interest
In Dying Modern, one of our foremost
literary critics inspires new ways
to read, write, and talk about poetry.
Diana Fuss does so by identifying
three distinct but largely unrecognized
voices within the well-studied genre
of the elegy: the dying voice,
the reviving voice, and the surviving
voice. Through her deft readings
of modern poetry, Fuss unveils
the dramatic within the elegiac: the
dying diva who relishes a great
deathbed scene, the speaking corpse
who fancies a good haunting,
and the departing lover who loves
a dramatic exit.
Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two
centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation,
even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death.
As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public
view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations
of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as
Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia
Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry’s fascination with pre- and postmortem
speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its
cultural silencing.
“Celebrating poetry’s power to bring anything, even death, to life, Diana Fuss’s Dying
Modern reanimates the elegy for our time. Bringing out the ethical call that echoes
throughout the form, her voice becomes the perfect guide to the vanishing voices that
elegy creates, preserves, and displaces at once. After reading this wonderful book you’ll
agree: death never had it so good.”—LEE EDELMAN, author of No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive
April 128 pages paper, 978–0–8223–5389–8, $21.95/£14.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5375–1, $74.95/£56.00
Diana Fuss is Louis W. Fairchild
’24 Professor of English at Princeton
University. She is the author of The
Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and
the Rooms that Shaped Them, winner
of the James Russell Lowell Prize;
Identification Papers; and Essentially
Speaking and the editor of Human, All
Too Human; Pink Freud; and Inside/Out.
“Diana Fuss’s exceptional meditative essay, Dying Modern,
is a subtle Keatsian inquiry into the irresolvable, and therefore
generative, tensions between genre and mode, and
between historical contingency and the constancy of ethical
commitments.”—MAX CAVITCH, author of American Elegy:
The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman
“Dying Modern is terrific. To have achieved so much in
such a short, brisk, and eminently readable book; to have
recovered such fascinating subgenres and thought through
their interrelations; to have returned to the well-worn terrain
of the elegy and come up with fresh insights and inventive
readings—these are remarkable accomplishments.”
—JAHAN RAMAZANI, author of Poetry of Mourning:
The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
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