Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother,a Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternala 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 "e;anxiety"e; 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.
| ISBN: | 9780429575259 |
| Publication date: | 1st July 2019 |
| Author: | Martell, James |
| Publisher: | Taylor and Francis |
| Format: | Ebook (Epub) |