Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother's Son

James Martell

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother's Son
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Country
United Kingdom
Published
30 June 2021
Pages
188
ISBN
9781032091778

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother’s Son

James Martell

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an anxiety rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-a-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

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