1913: The Cradle of Modernism

by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Overview

This innovative book puts modernist literature in its cultural, intellectual, and global context, within the framework of the year 1913.

• Broadens the analysis of canonical texts and artistic events by showing their cultural and global parallels
• Examines a number of simultaneous artistic, literary, and political endeavours including those of Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Du Bois and Stravinsky
• Explores Pound's Personae next to Apollinaire's Alcools and Rilke's Spanish Trilogy, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country next to Prouvést's Swann's Way

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405161923
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	11/19/2007
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading figure among the generation of French theorists taught by Derrida and by Lacan. His books include the Blackwell Manifesto volume The Future of Theory (2002), The Ghosts of Modernity (1996), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (2001), Jacques Lacan and Literature (2001), and Given: 1) Art, 2) Crime (2006). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan (2002), Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (1997), and the Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies (2004).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Modernism, Crisis, and Early Globalization 1

1 The New in the Arts 18

2 Collective Agencies 46

3 Everyday Life and the New Episteme 72

4 Learning to be Modern in 1913 96

5 Global Culture and the Invention of the Other 118

6 The Splintered Subject of Modernism 141

7 At War with Oneself: The Last Cosmopolitan Travels of German and Austrian Modernism 164

8 Modernism and the End of Nostalgia 185

Conclusion: Antagonisms 208

Notes 217

Index 235

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"With this book Jean-Michel Rabaté, one of the foremost scholars of literary modernism, serves up a sumptuous intellectual feast. Examining the currents of thought and creative activity that churn through a single year, the 1913 of his title, he achieves an epic overview of early modernism. Music, painting, technology, science, philosophy, mathematics, literature, sexuality—nothing escapes his probing gaze. Telling anecdotes, insightful criticism, and philosophical rigour are combined to produce a work that is both a pleasure to read and a major scholarly synthesis."
–Lawrence Rainey, University of York

Editorial Reviews

"While reading Rabatk's book I constantly had in mind Theodor Adorno's remark to Walter Benjamin about the latter's habit of 'occult adjacentism'.  Adorno, of course, meant this as a damning criticism of his friend's method in the Arcades project, but it beautifully describes the effect of 1913 and its kaleidoscopic presentation of a world that troublingly-uncannily-intimates our own." (MLR, April 2009)

"With this book Jean-Michel Rabaté, one of the foremost scholars of literary modernism, serves up a sumptuous intellectual feast. Examining the currents of thought and creative activity that churn through a single year, the 1913 of his title, he achieves an epic overview of early modernism. Music, painting, technology, science, philosophy, mathematics, literature, sexuality—nothing escapes his probing gaze. Telling anecdotes, insightful criticism, and philosophical rigour are combined to produce a work that is both a pleasure to read and a major scholarly synthesis."
Lawrence Rainey, University of York

“This book’s clarity and specificity will reward even readers familiar with his topics. Summing Up: Highly recommended.”
Choice

From the Publisher