ABSTRACT
This chapter sets up the terms of the problem through an examination of Derrida’s logics of obsequence and pregnancy and a brief analysis of the questions of self-creation and the maternal in authors like Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. After situating the book within a growing field focused on the mother and the maternal in modernism and theory, it shows how these modernist writers’ work is inseparable from an anxiety that the son-writer suffers as he realises that his modernist attempt at self-creation implies an erasing of his birth, and consequently, his mother.
