Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the terms of the problem through an examination of Jacques Derrida’s logics of obsequence and of pregnancy and a brief analysis of the questions of self-creation and the maternal in authors like Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Stephane Mallarme, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. It focuses on Baudelaire and on the relation between his understanding of the economy of his work vis-a-vis his mother and the conseil judiciaire imposed on him by her and his stepfather. The book explores the epoch of the modernist writer-son, starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, passing through Edgar Allan Poe, and continuing up to Samuel Beckett, and examines it through the effect that Derrida’s work has had in literature and literary studies—what has been called “The Age of Grammatology.”.