Eliot's Poetry Research Articles

Ghost in T. S. Eliot's Poetry

Ghost in T. S. Eliot's Poetry

Portrayal of Man’s Sorrows, Impotence, and Lack of Spirituality through Flowering Judas, Dogwood, Chestnut, Hyacinths, and Lilacs in T.S. Eliot’s Poems: A Textual and Analytical Study


 S. Eliot's poetry contains several floral references that are employed symbolically. This study investigates the symbolic connotations of T. S. Eliot's floristic symbolism in “Gerontion” and 'The Waste Land'. The form and essence of modernist symbols will be investigated to trigger profound and subconscious feelings in the reader, concentrating on the terminological and conceptual elements of the topic. The significance of flowering Judas, dogwood, chestnut, hyacinth, and lilac in Eliot's “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land” have been interpreted and explored using analytical, historical, and archetypal approaches as the “Gerontion” intended by the poet to be a prelude to “The Waste Land”. Textual and analytical research has been conducted to demonstrate the unusual utilisation of five flora referred to in ''Gerontion'' and ''The Waste Land''. The poems' texts and theoretical and historical sources have been examined to collect the required data for the paper. One of the most essential research objectives of the paper is to find out how these blossoms were used symbolically in two of Eliot's poems. In various contexts of the poem (historical, biographical, mythological, cultural, anthropological, etc.), the symbolic and common meanings of each flower has been investigated.

윤동주와 T. S. 엘리엇의 작품에서의 영국 성공회 가톨릭의 죄

Dongju Yoon’s poetry implied Anglo-Catholic’s belief and creed similar to Roman Catholic, even though he had protestant faith inherited from his family. All poems of Dongju Yoon contain conscience sin as well as original sin, because he felt ashamed of his country being persecuted by Japanese country. T.S. Eliot also felt ashamed of anglo-Catholic sin due to betrayal of his former wife, devoted lover and his mother. Eliot had to go to way of suffering and expiation for his sin of Anglo-Catholic belief and creed. Dongju Yoon probably studied Eliot’s poetry from professor yangha Lee during Yonhi College in 1940’s period before he went to Japan. The Anglo-Catholic traces in Dongju Yoon’s poetry are shame, original sin, sky, fear, suffering, death and resurrection, Eve’s effort, cross of the words that represents T. S. Eliot poetry and Anglo-Catholic’s belief and creed.

David Bowie and T.S. Eliot: Addressing the Problem of Poetic “Persona”

The article clarifies some features of the poetic system of the creative heritage of the 1970s. British poet and musician David Bowie (1947-2016), focusing on the concept of "persona" in the context of his work. "Persona" as a term is used in the article, being borrowed from the teachings of the German psychologist C. Jung, where it is understood as a social mask that hides the vulnerability of the individual. When applied to Bowie's work, the term "persona" implies an artistic mask, a special type of poetry realization, in which a creative person and a character are combined. Bowie's poetry, expressed through the unique "persona" at the center of his album cycles of the 1970s, is supposed to show signs of T. S. Eliot's impersonality. The article proves that Bowie was familiar with Eliot's poetry and could use his idea of "impersonality" of poetry in his work.

Loss of identity in T.S. Eliot's poems selected poems

T. S. Eliot is often regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The realities and pain of modern civilization after war are embodied in his creative works dealing with the aftermath of war and loss of identity, which earn him the Nobel prize in literature. There are several poems by this author that capture the experience of the contemporary man. There are three parts to this paper. The first part of this essay discusses the life and work of T. S. Eliot, the critical acclaim that his works have received, and the prestigious literary award that he has won. In the second part, we look at what makes contemporary poetry distinct. How T. S. Eliot enhances the characteristics that current poets employ to produce their poetry. The third section is a collection of Eliot's poems that reflect on and depict modern human life and the modern man's loss of identity, including "The Hollow Man," "The Waste Land," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," all of which were written after World War II. The poem "Prelude," which alludes to a musical overture to a contemporary day, is a perfect example. Eliot's poetry as a whole reflects the reality and sorrow of contemporary man's identity crisis. The study's conclusion summarizes its findings, which focused on how T.S. Eliot's poetry deals with themes of identity loss, the hardship of living, and solitude in the years after World War II.

Маска и душа: шекспировские образы в поэзии Элиота

Poetic and dramatic works by T.S. Eliot include numerous allusions to Shakespeare's plays, different collisions based on Shakespearean plots, theatrical techniques and settings of the great playwright, etc. This paper considers the ways and instruments of transforming and representing Shakespearean images in Eliot’s poetic texts, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “Marina”, “Coriolan”, etc. The important aspect of Eliot's reception is the appeal to Shakespeare’s heroes (Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Pericles, etc.) as archetypes for creating his own poetic characters. The researcher identifies two main ways of transforming and representing Shakespearean images: masks and dramatic monologues (“dramatis personæ”). The characters in Eliot’s poems use Shakespearean masks as a means of self-identification (Prufrock), they are components of “compound” images (“a cubist woman” in The Waste Land). The dramatic monologues of Eliot’s protagonists are pronounced on behalf of Shakespearen heroes (Pericles, Coriolan). Shakespearean allusions in Eliot’s poetry are to expand the boundaries of the text, deepen the characters, include them into a certain cultural paradigm, etc. The analysis of Shakespearean images in Eliot's poetry allows us to understand the peculiarity of perception for Shakespeare and methods of poetic mastering of his heritage in Modernist culture.

The Purpose of Allusions from Shakespeare's The Tempest in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

The purpose of the paper is to place and juxtapose T.S. Eliot, one of the most famous poets and theoreticians of the 20th century Modernism, in the context of the revaluation of Renaissance humanism, in which William Shakespeare is analyzed as a major influence and a source. In particular, the article discusses the associative purpose of Shakespeare's The Tempest in T.S. Eliot's poem “The Waste Land.” The use of Shakespearean associations and allusions is one of the main features of Eliot's poetry, and on the basis of the comparison, the paper analyzes the complex relationship that creates a rich intertextual connection between these two writers, separated by centuries and different literary traditions. Although Eliot did not recognize the extent of Shakespeare's presence in his work, the paper argues that Shakespeare was one of the most significant and evident sources of inspiration for the poet, who uses important figures and symbols from Shakespeare's plays in a deliberate attempt to enrich his poetry with new and contrasting meanings. There is an obvious thematic connection in both works to death, resurrection, and forgiveness. In this respect, I believe we can consider The Tempest as one of the fertility myths that Eliot uses to structure the poem. Its function is clear: a contrast is created between Elizabethan and 20th century values, and the question is raised whether revival, resurrection and atonement are possible in the modern era. The motif of death in The Tempest is illusory and regenerative, something that cannot be said for any episode of “The Waste Land”. In Shakespeare's play, the emphasis is on restoration and redemption—wrongs are righted, losses are no more, and moreover, by correcting old wrongs, a better, richer future is ensured. In Eliot's poem, the focus is on loss and forgetfulness, in “The Waste Land” no one remembers anything as unconsciousness and incomprehension is a curse for the characters, which separates them from their past and any future prospects. Assuming that “The Waste Land” allows itself to be interpreted with a hopeful ending, the allusions and references to this effect are taken from The Tempest, whose central theme is learning from past mistakes, acquiring new knowledge, and atonement, which is ultimately the key to remedying barrenness and misery. In this way, the use of associations of Shakespeare's play in Eliot’s poem is as heterogeneous as his attitude towards the great Elizabethan dramatist. Thanks to its so-called functional ambiguity, “The Waste Land” remains a constantly transforming and relevant text. By observing the complex intertextual relationship between these two English authors, it becomes evident that Eliot's early poetry is not only an example of the new Modernist aesthetics of the 20th century, but also a continuation and, most importantly, transformation of the literary tradition that preceded it in the form of Shakespeare. In conclusion, by examining the poetic fabric of Eliot's “The Waste Land”, it becomes clear that the poet uses Shakespearean associations with parodic and contrasting purposes. By analyzing the research topic, it is clear how diverse potential T.S. Eliot’s poetry has as the new era and new understanding not only expand the scope of interpretation of this or that work and creator, but also puts the research process in a modern, dialectical, and diverse framework.

The Presence of the Past

The Presence of the Past Robert Kramer (bio) Poetry and Freedom Discoveries in Aesthetics, 1985-2018 Paul Oppenheimer Anthem Press www.anthempress.com 213 Pages; Cloth, $125.00 This is a dazzling collection of essays, most of them published originally as book reviews. It deals with the nature of time, the comparative validity of induction and deduction, the reality of evil, and other profound philosophical questions. It also involves serious discussions of physics, history, government, psychology, art, music, and of course, literature, with a major focus on poetry. Works of British, American, German, French, and Italian literature are considered, as well as classical poetry. Obviously, in this brief review, from a collection of thirty-four articles I can only examine those that seem most significant. But even the "lesser" essays contain scattered aperçus and observations, launched in passing, but laden with insight and wisdom. "Eliot as Revolutionary," published in 1987, the centennial of Eliot's birth, begins the collection. The author's claim that T. S. Eliot "has never been more popular," was probably true at the time of writing but, unfortunately, I do not believe that it is true any longer." The poetintellectual is out of favor these days. Sincerity and passion are often seen as the major positive values to be sought in poetry. Wit, experience, learning, cultural awareness, and craft tend to be downgraded in favor of vague expressions involving love—or anger. Then Eliot's statement declaring himself a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion has not won him many new friends in the literary community. Allegations of anti-Semitism have also been damaging to his reputation, as well as feminist critiques of his "misogyny." Nevertheless, Eliot's achievements rise above anything on the contemporary scene. Oppenheimer's main thesis is "Eliot's poetry is revolutionary because it creates a new type of voice, a new type of fact and a new type of knowledge, all of which appreciably change the English language." This new type of voice is "a new universalizing and generalizing mode of utterance," as exemplified by Prufrock, who is "the twentiethcentury Everyman," "whose confidence in civilization and its nobility sickened and expired during four years of murder" and whose "values [End Page 25] floated free of their systems, which ceased to inspire belief." This is the voice "groping for meaning." The new sort of poetic fact consists of a deadpan association of past literature and present experience." Historical characters that might be termed archetypes reappear in a modern context, violating normal time sequence and naturalism. The author justifies this practice by asserting that "the aim of poetry at its highest is to turn history into a continuously present event." The third element in Eliot's revolutionary achievement is a new type of knowledge. By this the author means Eliot's realization that ordinary modern speech and the objects and processes of everyday urban life, including technology, can be fruitful for poetry. In the meantime, this insight has been exploited by countless modern poets. An essay on Ezra Pound is devastating in its negative portrayal of his character. But Oppenheimer's comments on his art in The Cantos is hardly more flattering as he remarks on "the frequent dullness of its lines, its clearly expressed bigotry, and the childishness of its theories of economics and history." He also mentions Pound's "occasional brilliance." It would have been interesting to read the author's perceptions in this regard. "Goethe and Modernism" offers a provocative historical precedent to Eliot's interweaving of poetry of the past with scenes of the modern world. In the late 1780's Goethe, having spent several months in Rome studying the monuments of antiquity and reading the Latin poets, composed twenty-four poems in the classical form of the elegy. The erotic aspects of these works combine Goethe's personal awakening and sexual liberation with the myths and poetry of the ancients. Oppenheimer maintains that "this is a type of modernist art indeed, in which the ancient, mythic and divine will blend—significantly—with the contemporary and the mundane. The ordinary, the quotidian, is to be lit up from within...

George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays

George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays

Palimpsests and Doubles: Echoes of The Rubáiyát in T. S. Eliot's Poetry after Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio

Palimpsests and Doubles:Echoes of The Rubáiyát in T. S. Eliot's Poetry after Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio Russell Brickey (bio) In his 1933 Norton Lecture "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,"1 T. S. Eliot related the following anecdote to explain his emergence as a poet: I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald's [sic] Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me. It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours. (25) Eliot's anecdote was by no means recondite, but its significance was never truly evaluated until Vinnie-Marie D'Ambrosio's 1989 Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald's Rubáiyát. D'Ambrosio takes T. S. Eliot's brief recollection about Edward FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer Poet of Persia and traces the putative effect of the medieval Persian-cum-Victorian [End Page 79] poem on Eliot's seminal modernist poetry. D'Ambrosio's thesis is fairly succinct: The themes that the Rubáiyát shares with The Waste Land are fruitful to explore: sterility and fertility, isolation and alienation, time, the questioning attitude, power, the ambiguity of the "you" address. A few of the many symbols shared, but transformed by Eliot's forceful originality, are the waste, the desert, washing rituals, Nothingness, broken images, rebirth after burial, wind, Procne, checkerboard games. Even structural parallels exist, though transformed. (182) Simply put, The Rubáiyát seems to have given Eliot his poetic instinct, an instinct that follows a "good writers borrow" process rather than the "great writers steal" dictate that Eliot espoused. This paper compares these aspects of FitzGerald's aesthetic and Eliot's later poetry, as well as their relation to their literary progenitor, Omar Khayyám, who by the time of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát was more legendary construct and caricature than actual author. Buried in history and revived by concepts that are untrammeled Orientalism, the Omar of the poem (as opposed to the real Omar Khayyám designated by his full name in this paper) rails against Persian aristocracy, petty bureaucracy, and Sufism, but the true subject matter is civilization itself. The Rubáiyát is about humanity, even if the ostensible marriage between Victorian England and medieval Persia is the implied provenance. In the same way that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" describes St. Louis or that The Waste Land invokes post–World War II Europe or that both could be set in London, The Rubáiyát evokes a specific landscape, depending on the reader's lens, or it can represent the world. As there are many readership communities in action at any one time, the onus of meaning falls on which fiction the community believes—the poem belongs to either the country of origin or the world at large—and thus both readings depend on how the community views the authors. This is a long way around to suggest that the authorial fallacy is unusually strong in these poems and that the patrilineal relationship between these poets is more pronounced than is usually the case. [End Page 80] With its great geographic, literary, and temporal leaps, the continuum between these poets suggests two doublings: the Imaginary-Double of Omar Khayyám when reinscribed by Edward FitzGerald's pseudotranslation (which FitzGerald referred to as "transmogrification" and which is often referred to as "FitzOmar" in critical literature today) and the Obscured-Double of FitzOmar within Eliot's poetry—a Double who speaks through the author, in this case a historical parent-author, from behind a textual veil. The Imaginary-Double (as I am using the term here) begins with a falsified literary source, initially presented as fact, that allows the actual author-translator-transcriber to speak with the assumed authority of a spurious historical figure. The Imaginary-Double can work only with a fiction of original source material. Readers must accept, no matter...

Emily Hale as a Muse to Eliot's Poetry

Emily Hale as a Muse to Eliot's Poetry

Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

This essay examines T. S. Eliot's poetry and drama in the 1920s and early to mid-1930s in the context of his contemporaneous reviews of and essays on detective and ‘melodramatic’ fiction. It begins by addressing the interaction between modernist writing of these decades in a range of writers and the burgeoning detective writing of the inter-war period. Rather than identifying a dichotomy between avant-garde and middlebrow literary culture, the essay argues that modernism is imbricated in the recreational literature of the period, as a discussion of Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and The Waste Land, in the central section of the essay, makes apparent. The essay continues by discussing Eliot's mixed reception of a popular detective novelist of the 1920s through the 1940s, J. J. Connington, drawing parallels between aspects of two of his novels, Mystery at Lynden Sands (1928) and In Whose Dim Shadow (1935), and Eliot's appraisal of Wilkie Collins and the ‘mythical method’ outlined in Eliot's 1923 review of James Joyce's Ulysses. The essay concludes with a discussion of Murder in the Cathedral and its relationship to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Musgrave Ritual‘ (1893).

(In)discreet Modernism: T. S. Eliot's Coterie Poetics

This essay examines T. S. Eliot's lifelong practice of coterie verse, focusing on his two major coterie projects, the Bolo verses and Noctes Binanianae (1939). Instead of seeing Eliot's coterie verse as an extension of his biography, I argue that the practice of coterie poetry was important to Eliot himself, who relied on its sanctioned indiscretion as a means of destabilizing not only his, but others' aesthetic sensibilities. After tracing Eliot's thinking about coterie through his prose, I turn to the Bolo poems to understand Eliot's poetics of coterie (in)discretion; I then consider Noctes Binanianae, whose writing, I argue, enabled an Eliot who had become (and belonged to) an institution (Faber & Faber) to recover the freedom for aesthetic experimentation that defined, for him, the coterie space. Having done so, I argue, he could return after a six year hiatus to the practice of lyric and to the writing of Four Quartets. My argument has important implications not only for the study of Eliot's poetry, but for studies of modernist cultures more generally. It proposes the coterie as a critical anti-type to the institution, a means of destabilizing the taste that the institution threatens to fossilize.

Death in Life at Christmas: T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi"

Death in Life at ChristmasT. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" Gerald P. Boersma (bio) One of t. s. eliot's most recognized poems is "Journey of the Magi."1 The poem first appeared inside a Christmas card. Richard de la Mare, who served with Eliot as director for the publishing house Faber & Faber, had the entrepreneurial idea of sending Christmas cards to those who had business with the press. In the spirit of Shakespeare, the series was called "Ariel Poems." The inside page of the card contained an unpublished Christmas-related poem from a contemporary poet, and the exterior was accompanied by an illustration from a noted contemporary artist. Between 1927 and 1931 the press released thirty-eight "Ariel Poems" by figures such as Thomas Hardy, G. K. Chesterton, Siegfried Sassoon, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot wrote five of the poems during these years, of which four were matched with illustrations by the avant-garde American poster artist, Edward McKnight Kauffer. A 1936 collection of Eliot's poetry for Faber & Faber included his contributions to the cards under the heading "Ariel Poems." Eliot's "Ariel Poems," while written for Christmas cards, are a far cry from the maudlin warm and fuzzy Hallmark cards typical of the season. As in most of Eliot's poetry, a deep melancholy pervades [End Page 23] The Journey of The Magi by T. S. Eliot'A cold coming we had of it,Just the worst time of the yearFor a journey, and such a long journey:The ways deep and the weather sharp,The very dead of winter.'And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,Lying down in the melting snow.There were times we regrettedThe summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,And the silken girls bringing sherbet.Then the camel men cursing and grumblingand running away, and wanting their liquor and women,And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendlyAnd the villages dirty and charging high prices:A hard time we had of it.At the end we preferred to travel all night,Sleeping in snatches,With the voices singing in our ears, sayingThat this was all folly.Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,And three trees on the low sky,And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. [End Page 24] Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.But there was no information, and so we continuedAnd arrived at evening, not a moment too soonFinding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember,And I would do it again, but set downThis set downThis: were we led all that way forBirth or Death? There was a Birth, certainlyWe had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,But had thought they were different; this Birth wasHard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,With an alien people clutching their gods.I should be glad of another death. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). This poem has been shared here under fair use guidelines provided by The Poetry Foundation. [End Page 25] the lines. Unfulfilled longing and a searing awareness that this life is a penultimate season of ennui mark the "Ariel Poems." Eliot's casting of Christmas is not typical of what comes to mind when we think of Christmas. Nevertheless, Eliot points his readers toward an essential aspect of Christmas not often considered. The joy of Christmas is the celebration of God entering into human life, the feast commemorating the moment when the immortal becomes mortal and eternal life breaks into the cycle of temporal existence. For Eliot...

As rosas e o tempo

O artigo se debruça especialmente sobre o ensaio de Antonio Candido, “As rosas e o tempo”, em que se destacam análises de poemas nos quais estas flores são imagens centrais. Também se refere ao seu estudo “La figlia che piange”, no qual o crítico busca interpretar algumas imagens na poesia de Eliot. Ora simbolizando a juventude e a beleza passageiras, ora a vitalidade amorosa, ora, por fim, a possibilidade de renovação social futura, as rosas e as flores em geral percorrem a poesia em diferentes estações históricas seja através de um tom intensamente lírico, seja, por vezes, na modernidade, através de um lirismo mesclado com inflexões irônicas e críticas.

Editions of Early Modern Drama Used by T. S. Eliot: A Resource

ABSTRACTThis article details which editions T. S. Eliot actively used to study Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and provides a rationale for the choice of editions listed. It begins by making a case for the crucial influence that early modern drama had on Eliot's poetry and prose and by offering an overview of existing criticism on the topic. It then outlines three major reasons for the importance of knowing which exact editions Eliot used to read the plays. The article provides a detailed explanation of the methodology used to determine the editions, which involved cross-referencing various sources of information, including Eliot's works and several archival documents, as well as comparing the orthography and punctuation of different editions.

From lilac to larkspur: self-refutation in T. S. Eliot’s later poetry

This paper argues that much of Eliot's poetry is unconsciously self-refutational and self-deceived. Our attention is distracted from this by its lyricism and intensely personal poignancy. Disgust at the contemplation of humanity, and self-disgust, underlie Eliot's parodie treatment of life: the horror of the sinfulness of the flesh, which can 'only die'. I argue that, while we cannot ask a poet to give an untruthful report of experience, something is wrong when the creative faculty is given so strongly to expressions of general disgust, over and above Eliot's anti-semitism, misogyny, sexual ambivalence and prurience.To counterbalance this effect, Eliot posits tlie ambivalent 'enchantment' of 'death's twilight kingdom', with its promise of redemption from sin, and the enchantment of childhood memories, which he presents as ultimately beguiling and illusory.But in 'Marina' the quasi-liturgical passage on spiritual death is 'placed' by the effect of the poem as a whole. Similarly, the life and vitality of the sixth section of 'Ash-Wednesday' evokes poetic values which repudiate the author's conscious intentions. In 'Little Gidding' he recalls 'Things ill done and done to others' harm.' It is the compound ghost who speaks (containing the Eliotic alter-ego), the Brunetto Latini of Canto XV of the Inferno. That Eliot is, in a broad sense, sexually — and therefore humanly — maladjusted explains the persistent presence in his work of a condition which 'remains to poison life and obstruct action.' His major critics have been curiously uncritical in this regard.His exasperation I suggest, is not with the deceptions of humanism but, part-unconsciously, with the self-deceived character of his Christian 'acceptance'. This is poetry of self-appeasement. DOI: 10.28998/0103-6858.2005v2n36p71-83

The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot

AbstractThe “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot's nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the development of Eliot's ecological literacy, beginning with her scientific field observations that incubated what would become her lifelong literary aesthetic of moral sympathy put forth in “The Natural History of German Life.” Eliot's initial moral sympathy advanced to an ecotheological perspective made visible in both Eliot's unpublished lyric poem “Ex Oriente Lux” and her canonic verse “A Minor Prophet.” Eliot's early and mature writings countervailed the competing discourses of theology and science as they relate to the natural environment.

Transpsychoanalysis

Transpsychoanalysis Patricia Gherovici (bio) In the 1990s, in the secluded space of my psychoanalytic practice in Philadelphia, I never thought that I was going to have to revise cis notions of gender and sexuality and dive into the deep waters of identity politics until one day I noticed something unusual in the complaints of one patient, who soon was followed by others. I heard them ask: "Am I straight, or am I bisexual?" More and more frequently, their questions were formulated as variations on: "Am I a man or a woman?" I linked their uncertainty about their sexual identity with the plight of some trans analysands, who can be considered as subjects for whom this issue is not a question but an answer. For instance, an analysand who identified as a trans woman affirmed her feminine identity by saying: "I have the worst birth defect a woman can have—I was born with a penis and a pair of testicles." In 2010, inspired by my clinical practice, I published a book entitled Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism. In that monograph, I used gender theory, psychoanalytic theory, memoirs of gender transition, my own clinical experience, and the model of hysteria to move from the pathologization of trans to engage more radically with the political dimension of trans, and to question the institutional control of our sexual bodies. This was a few years before the meteoric rise of the trans experience in popular culture that has made "trans" a daily term. What followed has been described as a "transgender moment," which is no doubt changing our notions of gender, sex, and sexual identity. Unhappily, it did not grant sexual minorities a full voice or a vote; most of those in the transgender community continue to live in precarious conditions. [End Page 144] Despite the increasing presence of transgender people in the public eye, the transgender community continues to be an understudied population, no matter which discipline is framing the work. This situation is even more pronounced in the psychoanalytic field. This is sad because I strongly believe that the trans experience can reorient psychoanalytic practice, while many contributions of Freud and Lacan hold great potential for a non-normative understanding of gender, particularly as it pertains to the lives of trans people. Psychoanalysis needs a major realignment, and the time is now. Guided by my ongoing clinical work with psychoanalytic patients who identify as trans, in 2017 I published another book, Transgender Psychoanalysis, in which I argue that those who undergo gender transition often do so because they deal less with the problems of sexuality than with questions of life and death. When someone says, "If I hadn't transitioned, I'd be dead, I would have committed suicide," what is at stake is less gender fluidity than finding a livable embodiment, which means a new way of being. To cross the frontier between the sexes is often experienced as traversing a mortal threshold, a passage from an impending doom to a possible renaissance; above all what is at stake is the crossing of an ultimate frontier. Quite often the predicament of analysands identified as transgender hinges around existential issues. Beyond what has been called "gender trouble," one often finds issues of life and death. If they could take seriously the question of death inscribed in sexuality, psychoanalysts should be able to rethink their practice, which is why psychoanalysts should engage in what I call "transgender psychoanalysis." This was anticipated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who once called up the figure of Tiresias, the mythical man-woman who was also a seer, as a role model for all psychoanalysts, a special protector or guardian of psychoanalysis—a patron saint. Lacan turned his attention to this mythical figure, a character he discovered during World War II, when he started reading and then translating T. S. Eliot's poetry. The legend formalized by Ovid's Metamorphoses book III has it that Tiresias became a prophet only after having changed genders twice. First, as a man, he came upon copulating snakes and separated them. The gods punished him for the interference with the natural...

Paris as ‘unreal city’: Modernist conceptions in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies

Michiel Heyns's sixth novel, Invisible Furies (2012) is deeply inscribed in the author's profound engagement in and knowledge of the grand modernist tradition. The article aims to illuminate and discuss this underrated novel in terms of some of its modernist attributes by relating the work conceptually to the works of great modernist writers, particularly T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, in order to demonstrate its impressive literary scope and density of meaning. While there are direct allusions to Eliot's poetry in the text, it is a certain sensibility and perspective that reminds the reader forcibly of Eliot's vision, particularly in The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925). Eliot's image of the "Unreal city", derived from Baudelaire's Les sept veillards, is particularly pertinent. A number of modernist concerns or themes are addressed in this context, in particular the ambiguous merits and value of the aesthetic, social alienation, the city and the concept of Forster's "eternal moment" (his equivalent to Joyce's "epiphany", Virginia Woolf's "moment of being" and Eliot's "moment in and out of time") as a possible means of salvation in the face of the meaninglessness of a spiritu- ally and emotionally arid, modern existence.