Modernism Self-Creation and the Maternal

<p>Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother<b> </b><i>Modernism Self-Creation and the Maternal </i>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-à-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. </p>