It is one of the paradoxes of modernist writing that in its self-conscious efforts at making it “new,” writers from across its experiment repeatedly turned to the past. Of course, what is absolutely new is always already historical, and Ezra Pound's rallying cry, “make it new,” invokes a repeated adage about the phantasy of leaving behind old orders – outworn words, aesthetics, structures, styles, politics, and psychic dispositions. Jacques Lacan suggests that “Repetition … demands the new,” and we might think of the modernist fixation on newness as registering an anxious obsession with the dilemma of their own repetition and belatedness.