Jean-Michel Rabate 
1913 
The Cradle of Modernism

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

Table of Content

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

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).