Description
Book SynopsisThis 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
Trade 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 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
Table of ContentsList 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
