1913: Cradle Of Modernism, The

Description:
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 Proust's Swann's Way

Review:
'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 Rabate, 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

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Introduction: Modernism, Crisis, and Early Globalization. 1. The New in the Arts. 2. Collective Agencies. 3. Everyday Life and the New Episteme. 4. Learning to be Modern in 1913. 5. Global Culture and the Invention of the Other. 6. The Splintered Subject of Modernism. 7. At War with Oneself: The Last Cosmopolitan Travels of German and Austrian Modernism. 8. Modernism and the End of Nostalgia. Conclusion: Antagonisms. Notes. Index

Author Biography:
Jean-Michel Rabate 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).