1913: The Cradle of Modernism

This innovative volume puts modernist literature in its cultural, intellectual, and global context, within the framework of the year 1913. This significant year was marked by many critical events and happenings, such as the first international recognition of non–Western writers when the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore; it was also the last year of peace before the eruption of the First World War. 1913 examines the wide range of diverse artistic, literary, and political endeavours undertaken in this one year. For example, while Yeats and Pound were collaborating at Stone Cottage and discovering Japanese culture, Joyce was completing his autobiographical novel in Trieste, Du Bois was creating his Ethiopian pageant in New York, and Paris was resounding with the scandal caused by Stravinsky’s contested Rite of Spring. The book also explores and compares Apollinaire’s Alcools and Rilke’s Spanish Trilogy with Pound’s Personae , and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country with Proust’s Swann’s Way . Engaging and insightful, this volume will encourage the reader to appreciate the breadth of activity that took place in this pivotal year, and its lasting influence.

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

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).

"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) “Rabate offers scholars and students a new portrait of cosmopolitan modernism to contemplate, making a study of globalization central to his understanding of the period’s literary and artistic endeavors.” ( The Review of English Studies , June 2009) “This book’s clarity and specificity will reward even readers familiar with his topics. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” (Choice)