1913 (eBook)

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).

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

"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)

"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