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

In this fascinating study, James Martell exposes the project of obliteration inscribed in the modernist myths and manifestos proclaiming the male writers arrival, originality, agency, and right to speak. The Mothers Son interprets the mother-son relation as constitutive of male modernist literatures sense of its identity and possibility. We rediscover Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett as matricidal sons, their acts of separating from, effacing and appropriating the mothers body indissociable from their coming to writing. This striking critical negotiation of sexual difference is worthy to follow major theoretical studies of matricide and the maternal by Elisabeth Bronfen, Barbara Johnson, Amber Jacobs, and Elissa Marder.

Sarah Wood, Reader in Literature and Theory (Retired), University of Kent, UK

James Martells The Mothers Son: Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal is a recalibration of the family romance and the crisis of modernist anxiety in terms of a surviving mother with the power of giving both life and death and its manifestations among late 19th- and 20th-century authors from Poe to Beckett. Set against a background of Derridian explorations of violence, the logic of pregnancy, the mothers generative traits, and the logic of obsequence developed in Glas, The Mothers Son offers alternate paths into issues of modern and modernist literary creation and thereby affords fresh, thoroughly research insights and challenges in almost every sentence.

S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University

Like every important text, James Martells first book, Modernism, Self-Creation and the Maternal: The Mothers Son, goes beyond its object of study. Derrida, Beckett and others (Baudelaire, Poe) are certainly the main figures in this essay, but Martells ambition is not only to do a new reading of them but also, and truly, to shake all the limits: between literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and poetics, rhetoric and gender studies. Ultimately, Martell invites us to a new way of reading and interpreting texts, a new way of thinking.

Bruno Clment, Professeur des universits, Universit Paris 8

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 analyses these authors in tandem with Derridas 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--vis the mothers 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.

James Martell is an assistant professor of romance languages at Lyon College. He is the co-editortogether with Arka Chattopadhyayof Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (Roman Books, 2013), andtogether with Fernanda Negreteof the special issue of the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui titled Beckett beyond Words (2018). He has published articles on Derrida, Deleuze, Beckett, and the cinema of Bla Tarr.

Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.

13 Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature

Milena Radeva-Costello

14 Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays

Edited by Jane Ford and Alexandra Gray

15 Fieldwork of Empire, 18401900

Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of

British Expeditionary Literature

Adrian S. Wisnicki

16 Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction (18801915) to Cold-War German Cinema

Joseph P. Willis

17 Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

The Mothers Son

James Martell

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035

The Mothers Son

James Martell

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of James Martell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-19169-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-20086-1 (ebk)

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To whom we write on

Since every book is a confluence of voices, writing a page of acknowledgements where I give their names to all those who helped me in the construction of this book appears as a daunting, almost impossible task. However, since in one way or another this book began when I started reading Samuel Beckett and Jacques Derrida back in college, I want to thank first all the professors I had then who helped me discover my intellectual path, among them: Fernando lvarez, Rodrigo Bazn, and especially Carlos Mendiola.