From Wyndham Lewis's Blast to Ezra Pound's injunction that modern artists must “make NEW” the traditions of art, literary modernism often branded itself with the rhetoric of novelty, energetic liberation, and daring experimentation. Whether celebrating Stephen Dedalus’s non serviam, applauding the virtuosic literary cubism of Gertrude Stein, or puzzling together the fragmented components of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, critics of modernism rightly emphasize the momentous and revolutionary watershed of new experimentation across the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. The discourse of modernism's newness, its ability to subvert convention, has filtered into literary history so thoroughly that even the recent rethinking of modernism through transnational frameworks and global scales tends to repeat the gesture of reinvention: what once was new is new again.

To be sure, new modernist studies has richly reinvigorated the study of modernism, expanding the field's spatial and definitional boundaries to ask how critics can tell the story of modernism without predefining it along rigid aesthetic or national demarcations. But modernism has always been interested in questioning such boundaries, in exploring its own porousness. It was, after all, in the atavistic and nonwestern subject matter of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that Eliot heard “the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life.” As in Eliot's own verse, the Rite's imaginative and, to an extent, fetishized portrait of the nonwestern Other is as much about the feeling of anxiety and restlessness on the eve of the First World War as it is about the pagan Russia it portrays.

But there is a knot in the line leading from pagan Russia to Western modernity that furrows and wrinkles the equivalency it suggests. The atavistic moments of desire, terror, and rapture in the Rite have, in Eliot's imagining of their modern equivalents, transformed from feelings into objects. We could also read the little scene Eliot conjures in his appraisal of Stravinsky as the opposite of the Rite's two-part juxtaposition of sexual vivacity and “thanatopic” violence: birth and death become sublimated into the routines of everyday life, of getting stuck in traffic, punching in at the factory, and waiting for a subway car on the return home.