Many people would say that Dostoevsky’ short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856. Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” […]