The Isle of Sculptures of Pontevedra (1999-2019): a model to recover nature as a social and cultural space in the city

La Isla de Esculturas fue concebida como una construcción cultural de la naturaleza y revertida a paisaje estético, teniendo en cuenta la singularidad etnográfica, histórica y antropológica del lugar donde se enclava: la Xunqueira del Lérez de Pontevedra. Constituye igualmente un homenaje al granito, material identitario de la escultura de todas las épocas y una referencia de la cultura y el arte que sus autores entroncan con la conciencia mítica y el simbolismo del The Waste Land (La tierra baldía) de T. S. Eliot. Como La tierra baldía, que reunifica pasado y presente, entre metáforas y símbolos, los escultores que intervienen en el espacio contorneado por el río Lérez acogen, en un todo, una pluralidad de alusiones culturales, lenguajes y conceptos, referencias clásicas y experiencias más contemporáneas. Fueron invitados a intervenir doce artistas: Giovanni Anselmo, Fernando Casás, José Pedro Croft, Dan Graham, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jenny Holzer, Francisco Leiro, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Ulrich Rückriem y Enrique Velasco.

Distance, and Intimacy, and T. S. Eliot’s Self-Critical Laughter

Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed communication and the limits of sympathy among reader, speaker, and subject. From depictions of laughing characters in Prufrock and Other Observations to the merriment in Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot treats laughter itself, rather than the joke provoking it, as a form of communication conveying truths language cannot. Eliot’s laughter comes from doubt. His comedy is both superiority-based and empathic: amusement reminds Eliot of his own failures. Eliot’s self-conscious laughter becomes a unique vehicle for communication between artist and audience, if not between individuals. In The Waste Land, tragicomic moments teach readers to be skeptical of their own satirical impulses, and almost bridge the abysmal distance between subjectivities.

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Exploring the Lyric-Dramatic Interaction in the Work of T.S. Eliot

<p>T. S. Eliot's fascination with the interaction between the lyric and the dramatic is evident from the fact that his poetry was often dramatic even before he began to write verse drama. Part of the reason for this interaction in Eliot was a kind of radical modernism that ensured a return to a primitivism where there was little distinction between the lyric and the dramatic. In this thesis I argue that this interaction is central to the nature of Eliot's creative work. The need for an interaction between the lyric and dramatic meant that The Waste Land (1922) possessed several dramatic qualities making it a precursor to Eliot's entry into the realm of poetic drama with the play, Sweeney Agonistes (1932). As part of my thesis, I conducted theatre workshops of the first two parts of The Waste Land in order to discover what dramatic elements emerged from the text and how their presence affected the lyric-dramatic interaction in the work, something which can surface only through performance. I argue that The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes occupy critical spaces in the mapping of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot's creative oeuvre. The intensity of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot's poetry builds up to a moment where he comes extremely close to drama in The Waste Land moving him to ultimately write his first play, Sweeney Agonistes. While Eliot's works after these two texts continue to exhibit characteristics of this lyric-dramatic interaction, the nature of this interaction undergoes a transformation after Eliot's conversion, manifesting itself in his religious poetry and drama which turns out to be a cul-de-sac in his experimentations. The intensity of this interaction in his work then gradually reduces to a point where the lyric and the dramatic no longer overlap especially after Eliot's first commercially successful play, The Cocktail Party (1949). By examining the reasons for the slow disassociation of these two crucial elements in Eliot's later work, I aim to stress the centrality of The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes to the lyric-dramatic trajectory in his work.</p>

Exploring the Lyric-Dramatic Interaction in the Work of T.S. Eliot

<p>T. S. Eliot's fascination with the interaction between the lyric and the dramatic is evident from the fact that his poetry was often dramatic even before he began to write verse drama. Part of the reason for this interaction in Eliot was a kind of radical modernism that ensured a return to a primitivism where there was little distinction between the lyric and the dramatic. In this thesis I argue that this interaction is central to the nature of Eliot's creative work. The need for an interaction between the lyric and dramatic meant that The Waste Land (1922) possessed several dramatic qualities making it a precursor to Eliot's entry into the realm of poetic drama with the play, Sweeney Agonistes (1932). As part of my thesis, I conducted theatre workshops of the first two parts of The Waste Land in order to discover what dramatic elements emerged from the text and how their presence affected the lyric-dramatic interaction in the work, something which can surface only through performance. I argue that The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes occupy critical spaces in the mapping of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot's creative oeuvre. The intensity of the lyric-dramatic interaction in Eliot's poetry builds up to a moment where he comes extremely close to drama in The Waste Land moving him to ultimately write his first play, Sweeney Agonistes. While Eliot's works after these two texts continue to exhibit characteristics of this lyric-dramatic interaction, the nature of this interaction undergoes a transformation after Eliot's conversion, manifesting itself in his religious poetry and drama which turns out to be a cul-de-sac in his experimentations. The intensity of this interaction in his work then gradually reduces to a point where the lyric and the dramatic no longer overlap especially after Eliot's first commercially successful play, The Cocktail Party (1949). By examining the reasons for the slow disassociation of these two crucial elements in Eliot's later work, I aim to stress the centrality of The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes to the lyric-dramatic trajectory in his work.</p>

"Between two worlds become much like each other": Liminal spaces in the poetry of David Jones and T.S. Eliot

<p>T. S Eliot remains a literary giant close to fifty years after his death while David Jones, in contrast, is undeniably a marginal figure in the world of poetry but one who is slowly gaining a larger profile. Jones has from the very beginning been aligned with Eliot by virtue of Eliot’s own comments and by a succession of critics who cast him as Eliot’s disciple. The time has come, however, for the side notes to Eliot, which have become almost a convention of Jonesian criticism, to be expanded into a detailed comparative study between his and Eliot’s work. Eliot scholars appear to show no interest in pursuing comparisons to Jones, as he is hardly mentioned, even in passing, in discussions of Eliot’s work. This too, is something that deserves to be reassessed. Undertaking a new approach to Jones-Eliot comparisons develops Jones criticism and opens up a new branch of Eliot studies. This thesis repositions Jones and Eliot from the way they have, thus far, been critically related to one another by focusing on liminal space in both poets’ major texts: The Anathemata, In Parenthesis, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. This threshold space can be found in their landscapes and in the way they adapt poetic techniques, such as imagery and juxtapositions of irreconcilable opposites. The between-space of transition manifested in their texts reflects the wider environment of flux and transition Jones and Eliot experienced in the first half of the twentieth century. Using the work of a range of literary critics, historians, philosophers, and geographers, including Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Michel Foucault, Edward W. Soja, Michel de Certeau, Andrew Thacker, Thomas Dilworth, David Harvey, and Stephen Kern, establishes a spatially focused model of liminality which facilitates a close reading of these spaces in Jones’s and Eliot’s work.</p>

"Between two worlds become much like each other": Liminal spaces in the poetry of David Jones and T.S. Eliot

<p>T. S Eliot remains a literary giant close to fifty years after his death while David Jones, in contrast, is undeniably a marginal figure in the world of poetry but one who is slowly gaining a larger profile. Jones has from the very beginning been aligned with Eliot by virtue of Eliot’s own comments and by a succession of critics who cast him as Eliot’s disciple. The time has come, however, for the side notes to Eliot, which have become almost a convention of Jonesian criticism, to be expanded into a detailed comparative study between his and Eliot’s work. Eliot scholars appear to show no interest in pursuing comparisons to Jones, as he is hardly mentioned, even in passing, in discussions of Eliot’s work. This too, is something that deserves to be reassessed. Undertaking a new approach to Jones-Eliot comparisons develops Jones criticism and opens up a new branch of Eliot studies. This thesis repositions Jones and Eliot from the way they have, thus far, been critically related to one another by focusing on liminal space in both poets’ major texts: The Anathemata, In Parenthesis, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. This threshold space can be found in their landscapes and in the way they adapt poetic techniques, such as imagery and juxtapositions of irreconcilable opposites. The between-space of transition manifested in their texts reflects the wider environment of flux and transition Jones and Eliot experienced in the first half of the twentieth century. Using the work of a range of literary critics, historians, philosophers, and geographers, including Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Michel Foucault, Edward W. Soja, Michel de Certeau, Andrew Thacker, Thomas Dilworth, David Harvey, and Stephen Kern, establishes a spatially focused model of liminality which facilitates a close reading of these spaces in Jones’s and Eliot’s work.</p>

Dadaism and Classicism in The Waste Land

Out of the wreckage of the First World War, classicism and dadaism charted two opposing paths forward. While one movement sought to overturn the institutions complicit in prolonging the war, the other sought to buttress these same institutions as a safeguard against the chaos of modern life. This essay studies the peculiar convergence of these contradictory movements in The Waste Land. The article provides a full account of Eliot’s postwar engagement with dadaism and classicism before examining the influence of each movement on The Waste Land. Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory will be introduced in the end to address the article’s central question: How can any one poem be both classicist and dadaist at the same time?

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

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.