“Cinderella seems so easy”: Archetypal Characterisation in Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot’s Wastelands

Abstract

This article presents an intertextual study of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ (1965) – the original version in the album Highway 61 Revisited. Only a few scholars dedicated to the works of Bob Dylan have ‘Desolation Row’ being a vague rather than an explicit allusion to The Waste Land. This study will demonstrate how the themes and topics in both texts are not only similar, but how the piece by Dylan contains direct references to Eliot’s poem as well as to other literary and cultural phenomena which Eliot references in his Wasteland – “alluding to allusions”, therefore. All this will be illustrated through the nearly identical processes of archetypal characterisation led by the two authors and the rhetorical use of multiplicity of voice. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]