Reading "The Waste Land": Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation.

Abstract

This book offers fresh commentary on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a book of modernist poetry published in 1922. It aims to be both a part-by-part analysis of the poem with periodic summations and a meditation on the limits of interpretation and the problematic nature of reading in the late 20th century. Bringing both Eliot's philosophical writings and contemporary theory to their interpretation, the authors aim to demonstrate that in his early essays and poems, Eliot anticipated by over 50 years basic insights of contemporary theory. Using The Waste Land as their reference point, they clarify the manner in which modernist texts both insist upon and defeat interpretation. Brooker and Bentley aim to address specialists and nonspecialists at once, introducing the uninitiated to their subject and establishing for the scholar the context and ground of their argument. They conclude with a discussion of the relation of Eliot's art to his early life and of modernism to infant epistemology.