scholarly journals Living Through the In-Between: T. S Eliot’s Philosophy of Human Existence

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raisun Mathew
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The People

This research paper aims to highlight the philosophical perspective of T. S. Eliot on the existence of modern human beings on earth. The recurring meaninglessness and alienation expressed in the poems “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Man” are discussed based on the context in which the poet correlateswith the reality experienced by the people. The encroachment of modernity of the twentieth-century civilization points to the loss of individual traditions, rootlessness and disorientation. The perpetual enquiries on the binaries are negated through the introduction of the intermediary space of existence. Certain vocabulary used in the poems throws light onto the existence of the poetic subjects in their in-between states referring to the presence of neither/nor situations. The fundamental nature of the reality and existence characterised by Eliot is revealed through the analysis of the poems as an experience of identity crisis amidst the politico-social situations leading to uncertain, anxious and ambiguous states of living. The paper concludes with the discovery of liminality and liminal existence of the poetic subjects that represent the existence of human beings regardless of time and place.

scholarly journals A Qualitative Analysis of the Poem “The Waste Land” to Investigate Spiritual Sterility, Moral Degradation of the Post-war Modern People and the Path of Salvation

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Nazmul Haque ◽  
Fahmida Pervin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Sexual Perversion ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Post War ◽  
Relationship Of

This paper’s overriding concern is to analyze the moral degradation, spiritual sterility, fragmentation, damaged psyche of humanity, the disillusionment of early twentieth-century post-war modern Europe and of course the path of salvation that are enormously manifest in the Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’. In the question of regeneration or salvation, Eliot in this poem instructs the morally and spiritually sterile modern man to follow the Indian philosophy, Vedas and Upanishads, the storehouse of knowledge, relief, and source of spiritualism, redemption and salvation. And also he concludes the poem with the sense that if they practise them in their life as instructed, there will be nothing but Shantih, shantih, shantih (peace and tranquility) in their life. This paper thus attempts to dissect how the poem develops exerting the acute sense of spiritual infertility, moral degradation, sexual perversion, meaninglessness in the human relationship of the post-war-devastated and dysfunctional world and concludes with the instruction of the path of salvation.

scholarly journals FORD MADOX FORD'S ESSAY ON POETRY AND T.S.ELIOT'S THE WAST LAND

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Rénaux
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
A Minor

The aim of this article is to bring together Ford Madox Ford's essay "Impressionism — Some Speculations", published as a preface to his own Collected Poems (1911) and considered to be "one of the most important critical documents to have been written on modern verse", and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), one of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century. By comparing both texts, one becomes aware that Ford's esthetic principles become concretized in Eliot's poetry and in this way Ford, although considered a minor poet, has succeeded in his criticism to prognosticate some of the directions Eliot (and consequently a whole generation of poets influenced by him)would follow.

Queer Surrealism

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Jesse Matz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Blind Spots

The fantasy that close reading should be some purer, more total encounter with a text is usefully dispelled by readings that achieve their closeness precisely because they have a specific need for proximity with their particular text. As this chapter shows in developing a queer reading of The Waste Land, that ‘need’ might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. A specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. The transformation of Eliot’s text from an early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily transformation is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it—an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Important Influence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The People ◽  
The Church

The book opens with a particular experience of learning ‘in the middle of things’—in the middle of a library. The experience of finding something unexpected (and in some sense ‘finding oneself’ in the act of searching) opens up an introductory consideration of the ‘Jewish matrix’, the religious world of the people of Israel, which forms the inner life of the Church through its liturgy and prayer and structures all its relations, both within the Church and without. The proposal for a theology of dialogue is set within the context of the Shoah as the dominating religious event of the twentieth century which has had an enormously important influence not just on contemporary Jewish–Christian relations but on theological reflection more generally. A theology of dialogue begins here, with intrinsically Jewish ways of thought about God’s presence to human beings.

Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1632-1647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Cole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Theory Of Literature

This essay employs the notions of enchantment and disenchantment to develop a theory of literature and violence across the twentieth century. War and violence were imagined either as generative, providing the symbolic core for cultural self-definition, or as entirely unredeemable, as pointless attacks on human flesh. A wide-ranging language is provided for elucidating the relation of literature to war and violence, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is considered as an example of the key motifs traversing and defining this history. The poem demonstrates that literary modernism, for all its tendency to encode, rescript, and miscegenate, was fully and intricately engaged with the polarization between transformative and useless violence.

scholarly journals Poetic Language and the Computer: A Corpus Stylistic Study of The Waste Land

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 230-239
Author(s):  
Eman Adil Jaafar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Corpus Stylistics ◽  
Semantic Domains ◽  
Corpus Tools

This study aims at proposing a methodology in analyzing one of the significant poems of the twentieth century, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. By means of applying the tools of the computer, namely; Wmatrix (Rayson 2003, 2008) and WebCorp Live (Birmingham City University). This paper seeks to examine whether corpus stylistics can be helpful in analyzing a single poem 2. Verifying the importance of corpus tools in interpreting poetic language. Moreover, this study attempts to examine key semantic domains, keywords, and concordances in the poem. This study proves that corpus tools are crucial in matters of saving time, reaching to accurate results and achieving much more objectivity than applying only the qualitative method in analyzing the data. Thus, it is recommended to integrate both methodologies (qualitative and quantitative) in the study of poetic language.

Marvell in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

2019 ◽  
pp. 772-792
Author(s):  
Steven Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter reviews Marvell’s presence in poetry in English from the early twentieth century down to the present. Beginning with T. S. Eliot’s decisive considerations of Marvell’s significance at the time of the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, the chapter develops a picture of Marvellian themes which recur thereafter. Eliot’s reflections on Marvell were written as he was working on The Waste Land, and consideration is given to the qualified exploitation of a Marvell-derived ‘wit’ and ‘conceit’ in Eliot’s sequence. The chapter considers the availability of Marvell’s work to writers in this period, from Herbert Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems onwards, to capture the significance of these editions within the writing of such as W. B. Yeats. Having established these complex threads of connection back to Marvell, the chapter then follows them through the work of later poets from Britain, America, Ireland, and the Caribbean including Empson, Ashbery, Gunn, Lowell, Walcott, Hill, Dunn, and Donaghy.

scholarly journals Intertextuality, Christianity and Death: Major Themes in the Poetry of Stevie Smith

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Judith Woolf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Stevie Smith ◽  
Great Writer

Stevie Smith, one of the most productive of twentieth-century poets, is too often remembered simply as the coiner of the four-word punch line of a single short poem. This paper argues that her claim to be seen as a great writer depends on the major themes which—in addition to “death by water”—she shares with T.S. Eliot: Anglicanism and the modern reworking of classical literature, with a strong, and in her case sometimes autobiographical, emphasis on female protagonists. Where the female figures in Eliot’s The Waste Land are seen as parodic and diminished contemporary versions of their classical originals, Smith enters and reimagines her classical sources, testing the strength of the narrative material which binds Phèdre, Antigone, Persephone and Helen of Troy to their fates. In contrast to Eliot’s adult conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Smith became a convert to agnosticism, engaging in a passionate poetic argument with the faith of her childhood, which led her to challenge Eliot himself. She brings both of these themes together in the most personal of her poems, which celebrate, and ultimately invoke, Thanatos, “the only god/Who comes as a servant”, and who puts a merciful end to all stories by “scattering... the human pattern altogether”.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
R. Bracht Branham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Representation ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Petronius Arbiter ◽  
Achilles Tatius ◽  
Waste Land

Who was Petronius Arbiter? The twentieth century’s most famous ancient novelist is one good answer. Of all the works of ancient prose fiction—by Apuleius, Xenophon, Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus—only Petronius’s Satyrica resonated with the twentieth century, providing Eliot with the epigraph for The Waste Land and Fitzgerald with the ur-text for Gatsby—originally entitled “Trimalchio at West Egg”—and Fellini with his film. The fascination of the arbiter elegantiae—as Nero’s court called Petronius—on twentieth-century avant-gardists is quite puzzling. What sets this fragmented text apart from kindred others? Is the answer precisely that it is one of a kind? Why did Petronius’s scabrous text become modern experimentalists’ favorite ancient analogue? That Auerbach’s Mimesis identified Petronius as one of three authors who exemplify classical representation could also be adduced as evidence of Petronius’s newfound status in the modernist century.

Little Magazines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Drouin ◽  
J. Matthew Huculak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
The Public ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of

In the history of modernism, little magazines were often the first venues to publish unknown authors who are now considered the leading lights of twentieth-century literature. A little magazine is a periodical dedicated primarily to serious literature, usually featuring poetry, short stories, serialized novels, and sometimes dramatic installments, as well as essays, reviews, and reader correspondence. They are called ‘little’ (sometimes also ‘small magazines’) owing to their cultivation of coterie contributorships and readerships in opposition to large commercial magazines whose content is strongly influenced by markets. As such, little magazines often prize experimental content that contravenes the public taste, which is one reason they were the primary vehicles for the development of modernism, its many movements, and their niche audiences. In many cases, the lack of a robust commercial apparatus meant that little magazines tended to be irregularly published and short lived, but with outsized contributions to literature and culture, such as the simultaneous serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review (1914–29) and The Egoist (1914–19) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in The Dial (1920–29) and The Criterion (1922–39). Little magazines originated during the nineteenth century on the European continent, in Great Britain, and in the United States. During the twentieth century, most little magazines" innovative agendae began as a reaction against the rise of large commercial periodicals that sold issues below cost in order to boost circulation, gaining more profit by selling advertising space.

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