Eliot's Waste Land Research Articles

Representation of cities as spaces through symbolist imagery in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda

In twentieth-century's poetry, the city has become an important and complex theme because when writing about cities, poets tend to re-formulate and re-define their relation with literary and cultural traditions. The city poses a particular challenge for the modern poets because of their commitment to social and cultural traditions they feel that their role has been fused to simply responding to the social, moral, cultural and psychological transformations that the city symbolizes. Is it right to read a poet, or poetry, as an extension of a place? The answer is may or may not be. The question is to answer the unique narrative description of Bombay in Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda and the city of London in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland that defines the city using imagery and symbolism in the best manner. Walking through Bombay and reading Kala Ghoda Poems recreates a city that is constantly shifting and dancing around, full of noises and colours, all the while exposing those lives that are pushed out of an expanding concrete jungle, hidden under bright lights and tall towers—the triumphs of development. Eliot utilises the ‘unreal city’ London as the main setting for The Wasteland and the city comes to embody the title of the poem that id portrayed as ugly, cruel and grey, lacking any real human warmth or meaningful connections. The study will be centred on a reading and analysis of deconstructive poetry to show how postmodernism is hinted at while also demonstrating continuous sociocultural and socioreligious activities through the use of symbolism and imagery. The study will continue with chapters broken down into many aspects, including a comparative analysis of Eliot and Kolatkar's poetry, studying the issue of experimentalism and symbolism as well as imagery employed in Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda and Eliot's Wasteland. The subjectivities and experimentation in Indian English poetry and Western poetry can be understood and explored through a comparison of Arun Kolatkar and T.S. Eliot.

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Reality and Mythology, Convention and Novelty in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Eliot's Waste Land , its implications, sources, his treatment of myth, reality, convention and novelty, has received a huge bulk of criticism among Eliot's scholars whose views of the poem are divided into two categories: positive and negative. This article examines these terms against Eliot's fundamental approaches to an individual work of literature in his "Tradition and Talent" essay and the application of the "objective correlative" when applying criticism to the poem. The article argues that Eliot employed myth, allegory and symbols in a very novel way to connect the past with the present; he could criticize without direction and educate and entertain his readers with host of interpretations applicable to the now and then. Another important key to understand Eliot's Waste Land is that his objective correlative is what links the poem which may look fragmentary, but in fact complete in thought with the help of this technique. By so doing Eliot has gained a statutes among the modernists in the realm of poetry – new modes of writing poetry.

ON VOICES AND MEDIUMSHIP IN THE TRILOGY

my sane and ordinary inner speech is itself likely to be a swarm of quotations, often from anonymous and vanished others. dead chatter away as inner speech of living.Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, Force of LanguageAll dead voices.Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot^What follows is not an attempt to avoid or plug epistemological vortex of Unnamable (Connor 2010, xix-xx), but to think about mediumship's role in forming this vortex. Voices are extremely important in trilogy - indeed, C. J. Ackerley suggests that mystery of may be profound literary creation (40) - and these acousmatic and disembodied voices often defy explanation. Yet, there are numerous references to voices in work that could be interpreted as forms of mediumistic channelling (that is, when a person channels voice of dead), such as in late television play Eh Joe. I want to suggest that this later exploration of mediumship is already present in a more obscured, vague, and spectral form in trilogy. Peter Fifield has analysed references to voices that persist after death, specifically protagonists of Unnamable, Malone Dies and The Calmative, in terms of Cotard's syndrome; as a supplement to this insightful neuropsychological analysis, I want to suggest that mediumship might also offer an appropriate frame for use of voice in these texts. was interested in possibility that strange, unknown, foreign voices might end up in one's brain; trilogy is testament to this enduring fascination.Numerous critics have linked writing to occultism, with varying degrees of playfulness. In The Death of Author, Roland Barthes suggests that writing itself begins when the voice loses its origin [and] author enters his own death (49). Although Barthes doesn't push this metaphor, skirts close to what we might term au dela - literally beyond, land of dead. is quite willing, where Barthes is not, to engage with these occult associations. Beyond Barthes, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature has suggested that literature and telepathy are deeply interdependent. As Pamela Thurschwell puts it, telepathic question par excellence is: whose thoughts are these, inhabiting my inner world (125)? This a question Unnamable asks with frantic urgency. Telepathy shares with mediumship an inexplicable transference of knowledge and voices, but of living rather than dead - and transferred content often remains internal rather than being externally channelled or performed through voice or automatic writing. Leon Surette has compellingly argued that occultism had an important influence on modernism, suggesting that Ezra Pound read T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922) as a text which shared certain traits (its seemingly random jumps in time and space as well as across multiple disembodied voices) with seances (69). But most prominent modernist with an interest in mediumship is W. B. Yeats, as evidenced in Words Upon Window Pane (1934).Beckett's voices raise many issues, as critics have long been aware. As Wilma Siccama observes: Beckett's characters hardly ever speak 'themselves': voices come to them, or they say as they hear it (175). Anthony Cordingley adds that: the narrators and characters of novels are increasingly haunted by sense that their voices are legacy of not only 'their' past selves/characters in earlier works by Samuel Beckett, but also of an estranged voice or voices inside them (135). Extending trope to author himself, Siccama suggests that Beckett does not 'speak' with his own voice: he is more like a medium, a receiver and transmitter of another voice, one that he hears in his head (186). Although this is a rather unusual proposal, numerous interviews suggest that consciously invoked trope of mysterious voices when discussing his compositional process. …

Appropriation of the Hegemonic Bookcase as a Cultural Rite of Passage and Right of Admission into the Israeli Poetry Club

This essay discusses the poetical works of three Israeli women writers: Rebecca Rass, Ronit Yochel Hittin and Michal Govrin. All three master the "Father Language" and patriarchal cultural assets, thus defying hegemonic traditional assumptions about women and writing as defined by modern Hebrew literature's founding fathers. In the spirit of Patricia Yaeger's description of the "emancipatory strategies" used by women writers for whom language is a source of power and pleasure, and inspired by Alicia Ostriker's characterization of women poets as "the thieves of language" engaging in "revisionist mythmaking," this discussion will demonstrate Rass's, Yochel Hittin's and Govrin's skilful use of language and intertextuality. Rebecca Rass recasts the rebirth myth that shapes T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and repositions it in the local Land of Flowering Bones , charging the ancient myth with present-day Israeli overtones. Eliot's wanderings across the territories of language inspire Michal Govrin in her Chronicle of Exegesis of the heavy Jewish bookcase. Likewise, Ronit Yochel Hittin sets the ancient myth of the Phoenix rising from its ashes in the context of Jewish history, thus sharpening its existential significance.

Seeking the Grail, Piercing the Veil: The Waves as Parodic Critique of Eliot's Waste Land

One of the first pieces Virginia Woolf published following the 1931 release of The Waves was a short essay entitled “A Letter to a Young Poet,” in which she addresses a recipient, “John” (the essay...

The Death of Freud: What Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence?

The Death of FreudWhat Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence? Jean-Michel Rabaté (bio) The Schadchen has assured the suitor that the girl's father is no longer living. After the engagement, it emerges that the father is still alive—and serving a term in prison. The suitor then accuses the Schadchen. "So? says the Schadchen. 'What did I tell you? That you call living?" Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious If the rhetorical question of my subtitle merely rephrases Achilles' choice, I would like to argue, however, that the question is not only a rhetorical one. It is not a rhetorical question for Freud and those who call themselves "Freudian." As we know, the goddess Thetis would have wished that her son lived a long and uneventful life; instead, Achilles opted for a short but illustrious life. Even though this was not exactly Freud's problem, since he lived a long and eventful life, it may have become our problem today, especially when we are confronted with what has been announced more than once either as "the death of Freud" or as the "death of psychoanalysis." My main argument here leads to the contention that it is a mistake to speak of the "death of psychoanalysis," since what is at stake is its obsolescence and the various forms it has taken. In such a mythological or classical context, death keeps its heroic [End Page 37] aura, whereas obsolescence calls up images of slow degradation, of sporadic decay and increasing technical malfunction. Indeed, since I have referred to Thetis and Achilles, I am reminded that Western culture is full of hapless people who obtained immortality but forgot to request eternal youth as well. The best-known figure is the Sybil, a character who was added at the last minute to provide a neat neoclassical Greco-Latin epigraph to Eliot's Waste Land. Given a voice via Petronius, the Sybil only repeats "apothanein thelô," I want to die. Closer to us, we find Jonathan Swift's horrifying Struldbruggs, those undying beings who appear in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels. Having contemplated the utterly monstrous physical degradation of those whose fate is endless senility, Gulliver notes wryly that the sight of these unfortunate creatures made him change his mind about survival: after such a vision, his "keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated." The two thinkers who sense the threat of looming senility in the very discourse of psychoanalysis after Freud had passed away in 1939 were Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan. Adorno was the first, as he reacted early to the "Californization" of psychoanalysis that he had experienced firsthand during his American stay from 1938 to 1949. In a lecture given in English in 1946 at the psychoanalytic society of San Francisco, Adorno attacked frontally Freudian revisionism. The two theoreticians he chose for his attack were Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. They were guilty of erasing what they considered Freud's "pessimism" and "pansexualism" and of replacing his metapsychology with weak culturalism. "Revised Psychoanalysis," a text that takes up most of the 1946 lecture, begins by taking issue with the way in which Horney aimed at getting rid of Freud's theory of the drive and transforming it into a theory of character and of human environment, ultimately leading to strategies of social adaptation.1 A typical title was Horney's 1937 The Neurotic Personality of our Times, in which Horney assumes that the root of neurosis is not a sexual determination but a tough social context marked by intense competition. Her culturalist optimism clashes with the "darker" side of Freud, whose philosophy should be placed, Adorno avers, next to that of Mandeville or Sade (this is an association that Lacan would always make). Freud's grandeur, [End Page 38] Adorno concludes, lies in his radical ambivalence facing culture and civilization and in his effort to show that social harmony cannot be postulated as a norm but must be questioned relentlessly. Lacan followed in the 1950s when he addressed in his own way what Herbert Marcuse had called the "obsolescence" of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, this obsolescence was undeniable as soon as psychoanalysis...

A Discourse on The Waste Land and “The Second Coming” from the Perspective on the Coming Days

purpose of this paper is to survey the perspective of the coming days of those two poets, Yeats and Eliot, comparing The Coming and Waste Land. Both Yeats's Second Coming and Eliot's Waste Land present a renewal process, but each one focuses on different goals and subjects; Eliot on a particular person's transformation, whereas Yeats predicts a switch of the entire world as a result of an escalation of chaos. And while Yeats attempts to present a definite picture of what he believes will happen at the time of this renovation, as a human being, lack of foresight leaves him to conclude with nothing more than an unanswerable question. Eliot, on the other hand, uses ambiguity to support and develop his theme: death is the way to rebirth. But for Eliot this rebirth, which must be necessarily obscure and extremely perplexing to the newly-born. In contrast, Yeats maintains a pessimistic tone created by his futility on the bleak situation. Though the two poets see the present similarly, their religious differences cause them to view the future differently, consequently Eliot's Waste Land has a much more hopeful theme than Yeats's The Coming.

The Graphic Novel and the Age of Transition: A Survey and Analysis

The Graphic Novel and the Age of TransitionA Survey and Analysis Stephen E. Tabachnick Owing to a large Number of excellent adaptations, it is now possible to read and to teach a good deal of the Transition period literature with the aid of graphic, or comic book, novels. The graphic novel is an extended comic book, written by adults for adults, which treats important content in a serious artistic way and makes use of high-quality paper and production techniques not available to the creators of the Sunday comics and traditional comic books. This flourishing new genre can be traced to Belgian artist Frans Masereel's wordless woodcut novel, Passionate Journey (1919), but the form really took off in the 1960s and 1970s when creators in a number of countries began to employ both words and pictures. Despite the fictional implication of graphic "novel," the genre does not limit itself to fiction and includes numerous works of autobiography, biography, travel, history, reportage and even poetry, including a brilliant parody of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land by Martin Rowson (New York: Harper and Row, 1990) which perfectly captures the spirit of the original. However, most of the adaptations of 1880–1920 British literature that have been published to date (and of which I am aware) have been limited to fiction, and because of space considerations, only some of them can be examined here. In addition to works now in print, I will include a few out-of-print graphic novel adaptations of 1880–1920 literature because they are particularly interesting and hopefully may return to print one day, since graphic novels, like traditional comics, go in and out of print with alarming frequency. Outside of these adaptations, there are completely original graphic novels that utilize literary and historical characters and events from the period. Again, I do not have the space to treat them here. Two of the most famous are Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), in which Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo, among [End Page 3] other Victorian heroes, appear together, and From Hell (1991), a heavily footnoted but still fictional treatment of the Jack the Ripper case. Those who may be interested should read Christine Ferguson's “Steam Punk and the Visualization of the Victorian: Teaching Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell” in my edited collection, Teaching the Graphic Novel (New York: MLA, 2009). One basic difference between graphic novels and films, another visual medium into which literary works are often adapted, is that graphic novels offer a reading experience in which, as in traditional reading, the reader controls the speed of perception and can linger or look backward at will. And a basic difference between graphic novels and drama, another visual experience, is that the graphic novel can accommodate reasonably long passages of narration, while drama usually includes only dialogue. Another basic difference between graphic novels and film and drama adaptations is that the graphic novel illustrator can draw characters as he or she desires them to look, while film and drama directors are limited to the appearances of living actors available for the necessary roles. Moreover, unlike film or drama, the graphic novel can be seen as the attempt of the physical book to survive in an electronic age by combining the advantages of the traditional reading experience with those of the computer screen, which often provides visual objects alongside text. This opens up the possibility of discussions (in the scholarship and in the classroom) about the different visual media and the history of the physical book, including William Morris's emphasis on “the book beautiful” as a physical object, as well as about the very nature of reading. And improved text readers have moved the conversation about book history and the nature of reading to yet another dimension, since graphic novels no less than prose novels can be read on electronic readers, such as Amazon's Kindle 2. Regardless of the format in which it is read, what makes a good adaptation from pure text to graphic novel format? I think that two qualities are essential: first, a good adaptation should be faithful to...

Authority, Autonomy, Submission and Resistance: The Panoptic State in Kafka's The Trial

Wandering through Kafka's The Trial by way of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, this paper shows how The Trial's literary modernism lines up all-too-neatly with Foucault's idea of the panoptic state. The paper then goes on to argue that the disorienting paranoia felt by Kafka's protagonist, a disorientation not unlike that of other modernist works like Picasso's cubist paintings or Eliot's Waste Land, resembles the way any litigant dragged into a legal proceeding might feel. Frightened and more or less alone, Kafka's protagonist has no idea how to defend himself and so his defense appears impossible. In literary modernism, however, a fourth dimension outside perspective is available, so that a museum goer can recognize Picasso's cubist women or cities for what they are. This perspective is what a good lawyer ought to provide, using his or her expertise to help a client navigate what might otherwise feel like a nightmarishly jumbled cityscape.

Intertextual resonance in Christopher Okigbo's poetry

Artistic creativity can be demonstrated in several ways, one of which is in the area of intertextuality as a literary endeavour. Intertextuality is the by-product of wide scholarship, which Christopher Okigbo exemplifies in his poetry. No work of art exists in a vacuum, as every writer is said to operate within a given literary tradition that has preceded him. This being the case, the issue of virginal purity in works of art is ruled out completely, if not partially. And rather than being a vice, this artistic device is a virtue. If anything, it is a demonstration of literary creativity; how a writer is able to re-echo the theme, structure and style of other writers before him. That is to say, no text is totally independent of the influence of other texts. Accordingly, Christopher Okigbo in his Labyrinth With Path of Thunder re-echoes the themes and style of other texts such as the Bible, classical literary sources of ancient Babylonian, Greek, Roman and some nineteenth and twentieth century literary traditions of Hopkin's The Wreck of the Deutschland, Debussy's Nocturne, Melville's Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eliot's Waste Land, etc. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 3 () 2006: pp.109-120

Allusion as Form:. The Waste Land and Moulin Rouge!

Allusion is usually considered a literary technique, but relatively little attention has been paid to the notion of allusion as a literary form. In this essay, I attempt to describe the allusive form based on two prominent examples, T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! Though radically different, the two works embody distinguishing characteristics of the allusive form. These are intertextuality, or a dependence upon outside sources for sense and significance; heightened and self-conscious artificiality; a confrontational attitude toward the audience; elitism, based on the exclusivity of allusions; appropriation of multiple cultures; and pervasive anachronism. Though prone to numerous failures, the allusive form allows the creation of a unique dialogue between artist and audience, as well as a precarious simultaneity of past, present, and future.

"If You Experience Difficulty in Reading. . . "

eviewing Eliot's Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses in the inaugural issue of Time magazine, an anonymous reviewer proposed that There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand (qtd. in Diepeveen 14). Such observations, mobilizing the perspective of the regular fellow with a certain heavy-handed wit, have come to stand for the resistance to what we now call high modernism. Yet compare Eliot's own remarks. In 1921, reviewing Herbert Grierson's anthology of metaphysical lyrics in the Times Literary Supplement, he had observed in an aside, We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult (Selected Essays 248). And the reader will hardly need to be reminded of Joyce's famously accurate prediction regarding the affinity between a certain work of his and the professorial attention span.1 It is the originality of Leonard Diepeveen's The Difficulties of Modernism to

Virtual Histories: The Year as Literary Period

Michael North is professor of English at the University of California,Los Angeles. He is author, most recently, of Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999). He has completed a Norton Critical Edition of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (2001) and is at work on a study of the visual arts, spectatorship, and modern literature.

The pub in literature: England's altered state

Introduction - the connection between the English nation, its hostelries and its literature. 2. Early doors :The Tabard in Canterbury Tales Betty's Alehouse in Piers the Plowman Ballad of John Barleycorn Skelton's Tunning of Elynour Rummyng. 3. The Falstaffian state: Falstaff and Hal in the Boar's Head. 4. Wonderfull Yeares: Ben Jonson's New Inn Taming of the (and a) Shrew Dekker. 5. Pepys pissed: drinking songs (1640s-1700) Diary of Samuel Pepys - the various uses Pepys found for inns, taverns and alehouses - not all of them to do with drinking. 6. Jovial, Brutal, Vulgar, Graphic Ned Ward: Spy and sundry pieces. 7. Scene, an inn? and horrible gin: Farquhar's Beaux Stratagem Gay's Beggar's Opera Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. 8. Where did the Romantics drink?: more Goldsmith Cowper's Task Crabbe's Borough Wordsworth's Benjamin the Waggoner Immortal Dinner Party Lamb's Letters (Salutation and Cat). 9. Dickens: Maypole in Barnaby Rudge and a riot of other hostelries. 10. Of rainbows and fingers: Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Mayor of Casterbridge. 11. Our mutual wasteland: Arthur Morrison's Red-Cow Group (a short story in Mean Streets) T.S. Eliot's Waste Land Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square A.E. Coppard's Black Dog John Hampson's Saturday Night at the Greyhound. 12. Kegged: George Orwell's Moon under Water Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning J.M. O'Neil's Duffy is Dead Michael Curtin's League Against Christmas Martin Amis's London Fields.

A Crown for the King (review)

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 348 Reviews A CROWN FOR THE KING. By Solomon Ibn Gabirol. David R. Slavitt, trans. pp. xii + 88. New York, NY: Oxford, 1998. David R. Slavitt's A Crown/or the King brings Solomon Ibn Gabirol's philosophical poem into its third English translation. Israel Zangwill's bilingual edition (The Royal Crown. JPS: 1923), and the solid translation of Bernard Lewis (The Kingly Crown. London: Vallentine, Mitchell: 1961) are both out of print but still available on library shelves. Do we need a new translation? After forty years, an accessible and contemporary version of a classic text is welcome. Surely, too, a great poem cannot have too many translators, and, at least according to its translators, Ibn Gabirol's Keter Malkhut is a great poem. If you like reading philosophical poetry, particularly of the neo-Platonic type, perhaps it is. Slavitt has reproduced (literally, by photo offset) the Hebrew text of Zangwill's edition, unfortunately without any of the critical apparatus Zangwill painstakingly appended to his work. Although Slavitt never claims to be producing a scholarly study, some readers may find problematic his unacknowledged reliance on a Hebrew text Zangwill constituted carefully from some two dozen manuscripts. I. A. Zeidman's critical edition of the text in Hebrew (Jerusalem: 1950) seems not to have attracted Slavitt's attention at all. Moreover, both Zangwill's and Lewis's English texts have influenced Slavin's interpretation of the Hebrew, so that his translation often echoes and even rephrases the earlier works. The brief introduction depends heavily on Lewis; the first half (especially pp. vii-x) essentially abridges parts of Lewis' introduction (see pp. 14-19). There is no extended discussion or overview of the poem, whose tripartite thematic structure is highlighted both in Lewis' introductory remarks and in the subdivided format of his translation. Zeidman concisely captured the essence of this structure in the triad c-t.-m i1"'''~' .-.,,~, ("the Creator, Creation and Mankind" p. 6). In contrast, Slavitt's compares Ibn Gabirol's solitary religious ecstasies to Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (p. ix) and the poet's use of biblical citation to Eliot's Waste Land (p. xii). The analogies are unfortunate. "Solitary contemplation and private prayer" (p. ix), for one, were never considered an adequate substitute for public worship in eleventh-century Spain. And shibbutz, the weaving together of biblical verses and fragments to construct a new text, was not unique to Ibn Gabirol but a hallmark of the Spanish Jewish poetic school. Slavitt's spare bibliography will not provide Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 349 Reviews additional context; only two of the twenty cited works actually treat Ibn Gabirol or his work. Slavitt is capable of a pliant English style, which sometimes achieves the tone of "intimacy and power" he ascribes to his source (p. ix). Of all three translators, Slavitt tries most to harness the vitality of common speech, and his text is generally easy to read. Ibn Gabirol's sleek elegance of expression can result in extremely spare Hebrew constructions, which Slavitt often refonnulates in an expansive, sometimes improvisatory, style. Sometimes the additions are overdone, although this is a matter of taste as well as accuracy . For instance, at the end of section VII, Ibn Gabirol states succinctly: i'Min MS, ,r,o, i'Min 'b~p ~ .nnrn 9~~n ,., s,:lOm l'lTI .c'1Il1 "M nnM [1l.6~9]. Literally, the passage reads: "You are the Light of the world. The eye of the intellect yearns for You and is astounded; it can see the [light's] edge but not its entirety." Slavitt translates, "You are light that is eternal: the intellect's eye that was made to behold you and yearns for you catches only glimmerings, but all of you we cannot see: it is at once so glorious and blinding." Or, as another example, the end of section I reads: ,,0., n.un rum rr:::n 1S, "o'm [1.14]. This becomes: "Yours is the secret of secrets: your love of creation, the yearning of all the fonns for material being, your love, that is, of your creatures, of us" [2]. (And compare Zangwill: "In Thee is the veiled...

Coming to Jakarta: Poetry, Information, and Disaster

Academics have very little leisure time. The only games we play are Clifford Geertz calls deep games, in problematic essay on Bali cited so frequently in this poem. In order then to make time for things like genocide and New World Order in his busy life, and in ours, Berkeley medievalist Peter Dale Scott has invented a poetic board game called Coming to Although it comes without instructions, most people get hang of it pretty quickly: five-page bibliography in back of book and marginal glosses and citations throughout are heavy clues, at least to academic readers and knowledge buffs, that game is in fact about following clues - it's a research game, an intelligence-gathering game. Our kind of game. Two of three writer-academics who wrote on poem for 1990 issue of Agni Review (31/32), as well as man who interviewed Scott for that issue, took same tack, discussing results of research they found themselves conducting into American involvement in Indonesian affairs as they read poem. Robert Hass's review ends in fact with an update of government's account of Indonesian massacres - this just in from San Francisco Examiner. I'd like to account here, at least in part, for exhilarated awe with which these readers and others like them participate in intelligence game of Scott's poetry. Ross Labrie, reviewer for Canadian Literature (no. 122/23, 1989), writes from off in left field that what one with fondness from Scott's poem are boyhood scenes in Westmount and Memphremagog area... (146). That attitude towards poetry, or kind of reading it attests to - aesthetic pursuit of private nostalgia - is not in play here: as Scott proposes in canto 2, Let us examine carefully // good reasons / you and I / don't enjoy reading this. Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror is an epic, and one that explicitly claims its place in a continuum poet both acknowledges and accuses: Virgil is invoked by name in first tercet (the stanza form poem shares with The Divine Comedy), and whole narrative is framed as a descent into Hell, begun as a near-drowning in a childhood lake, Avernus Canadian Literature's reviewer fondly remembers as the Memphremagog area. It is divided into five cantos, each further divided into several two- or three-page sections, and it oscillates by something like free association between hard-factual narrative of covert American involvement in post-colonial political unrest, particularly in Indonesia in 1960s, and an autobiographical account of author's own involvement, one way or another, in that defining American crime. (Before he threw his lot in with poets and professors Scott had been a Canadian diplomat, a Ph.D. in political science educated at places like Oxford and Paris, a family friend of people like the Dulles clan who also summered in Lake Memphremagog area.) After first short canto margins are littered, like those of Coleridge's Rime of Ancient Mariner, with reference notes - much of poem's language is a tissue of fragmented quotation and paraphrase. A bibliography of 108 items gives full data on these sources in back. This list is not latest event in trend set by Eliot's Waste Land - these are not additional remarks from a poet bent on teaching us how to read his poem, but a set of sources from which we can learn more about concrete historical circumstances which occasioned poem. The emphasis is not on Scott's meanings, but on meanings of Jakarta. As a result, poem is in a way subsumed by its bibliography, becoming itself another source of information on American involvement in 1965 massacres that attended overthrow of Sukarno. In an essay about poem's occasion, Scott writes, the poem arose initially out of impossibility of reaching any U.S. audience on this unspeakable subject in prose. …

From the Myth to the Wake of Home: Literary Houses

From the Myth to the Wake of Home:Literary Houses Virginia L. Wolf (bio) "And what would comfort be?" This question at the end of Adrienne Rich's "In the Wake of Home" voices a central concern of modern literature. Leonard Lutwack concludes The Role of Place in Literature with a chapter entitled "Placelessness: The Concern of Twentieth-Century Literature" (182-245), having noted early on in the book that, despite its rich history and symbolism, "the house is no longer a significant place in the writing of our time" (37). As he and many others point out, T S. Eliot's Waste Land named and described the world that prevails in our literature: a hell of fragments and loss, without security or comfort, without God or meaning. For the most part, writers for adults portray us as both deprived of a familiar home and free in an unfamiliar universe. Implicitly, they show that comfort, or the belief that one can be at home in the world, is myth. They also show that the myth of being at home continues to comfort us despite our more or less conscious awareness of what Rich calls "the hole torn" in belief. Within each of us, to use Rich's words: The child's soul carries on in the wake of home building a complicated house a tree-house without a tree finding places for everything the song the stray cat the skeleton The child's soul musters strength where the holes were torn but there are no miracles: even children become exhausted. (ll. 133-42) Rich implies that our attachment to myth is childlike in every sense of that word—we cling with a child's innocence, energy, and enthusiasm, a child's need for security and certainty, a child's persistence [End Page 53] in the face of contradictions. Her emphasis speaks especially to the concerns of children's literature. Whereas much adult literature laments our homelessness and reflects the fragmentation or loss of myth, most children's literature celebrates home and affirms belief in myth. Images of home abound in children's literature, not only in houses, such as the little house in the big woods, but in a variety of other places, such as Tom's midnight garden, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, the yellow brick road, the river at Green Knowe, the forest of Pretty Pearl, Earthsea, and the East Side of New York City, where Harriet spies. Many critics have noted the celebration of place in children's literature. In Fairy Tales and After, Roger Sale emphasizes the importance of snug and cozy places throughout the history of children's literature. Phyllis Bixler, Lois Kuznets, Anita Moss, Jon Stott, and others write of the pastoral or lovely place in Victorian and twentieth-century children's literature. Kuznets writes of topophilia, or love of place itself, as expressed in The Wind in the Willows. And I have written about the magic circle that is home in the Little House books. My impression is not only that home is the dominant place in children's literature, but also that the house is the chief form it takes. Why children's literature thus differs from adult literature is an interesting question. If we believe in myth as something outside the material order of nature and therefore alien to the adult rational and scientific mind, we may—like Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Rowe Townsend, for example—see children's literature as one of the last strongholds of symbolic truth and pure storytelling. Of course, this conception of children's literature is under attack these days, most notably by Jacqueline Rose, who argues that the "glorification of the child . . . suggests not only a refusal to acknowledge difficulties and contradictions in relation to childhood; it implies how we [adults] use the image of the child to deny those same difficulties in relation to ourselves" (8). More specifically, she explores how the myth of childhood, as "an ultimate beginning where everything is perfect or can at least be made good" (138), has denied throughout history the ambiguities and abuses of sexuality, class privilege, language, economics, and politics for both child and adult...

Toni Morrison's "Allegory of the Cave": Movies, Consumption, and Platonic Realism in "The Bluest Eye"

Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is an unusually effective exploration of racism in twentieth-century America in part because of place it gives to central legacies of Western civilization. Like Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man draws on Emerson and Whitman as well as folklore, Morrison recognizes importance of Western literature and philosophy to Afro-American experience in America; in some ways The Bluest Eye stands opposed to more hermetic work like Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which despite its many strengths does not come to terms with intellectual and economic foundations of racism and whose portrayal of character and personal growth suffers accordingly.1 Morrison's characters are more convincing and ultimately more moving than Walker's because they operate in a world shaped by a complex and sometimes repressive cultural heritage. In The Bluest Eye this heritage is primarily represented by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Plato's Allegory of Cave in Book VII of The Republic.2 These two important moments in Western culture provide specific thematic and structural elements in novel; in a larger sense they suggest Morrison's belief in close relationship between intellectual traditions and particular economic and social conditions. Eliot's contribution in The Bluest Eye is more apparent because it operates on level of imagery as well as theme and structure. In prologue narrator Claudia MacTeer remembers when she and her sister Frieda planted marigold seeds in a childish rite they hoped would guarantee health of their twelve-year-old friend Pecola's baby. If seeds sprout, they think, baby will thrive. But no seeds sprout, baby dies, and Pecola spends her life plucking her way between tire rims and sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all waste and beauty of world.3 Only much later does Claudia understand that it isn't her fault, that the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year (160). The Bluest Eye is framed by narrator's brooding recollection of a wasteland, and seasons which title major sectionsAutumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer - mark off a parody of rebirth and growth. In the thin light of spring (127) Pecola Breedlove is raped by her drunken father (a cruel sort of breeding indeed), and in summer, pregnant, she goes mad after equivalent of Eliot's Mme Sosostris works a phony spell to give her blue eyes. The echoes of Eliot's Waste Land are important for thematic and structural rea

The Varied Portrait of Barbara Pym: A Review of the Post-1985 Critical Explosion

Since the discovery of British author Barbara Pym in 1977 when she was cited by both Philip Larkin and Sir David Cecil as the most ignored contemporary novelist, there has been a growing number of Pym readers and critics. But as yet there is little agreement in the Academy as to whether Pym is good merely for recalling sabbaticals in England or whether she is to be viewed as a serious and important novelist. The assessment of Pym's work is complicated by its complex tone: it is difficult to decide whether the humor is gentle laughing at our more absurd moments, or whether behind the (as Pym put it) cozy mood there is a much bleaker world view, perhaps bleaker than Pym herself was willing to acknowledge. This disagreement about tone has been evident at every MLA session on Pym's work I have attended. In the brief discussion following the reading of papers there has usually been an exchange between the Pym fanciers, dressed in tweed (looking not too dissimilar from Pym's academic Esther Clovis with her hair like a dog) who mainly want to worship the world Pym created and insist that her works are entirely celebratory; in opposition there are those critics, usually not in tweed, who insist that the works are much darker, that the good humor of the author and characters is close to desperation, for the world of the novels echoes Eliot's Waste Land. The more usual Pym comparison is to Jane Austen, and although there are some general similarities, the most revealing parallel may be between reader reactions. More than a few Janeites read Austen not for her insights, or even her irony; instead Austen is used as a non-prescription tranquilizer. The result is not very illuminating for the novels, and, as recent biographies of Austen have shown, creates an idealization of the author which obscures Austen's more disturbing world. The nature of Pym's work has been similarly obscured by the autobiography, A Very Private Eye (New York: Dutton, 1984), edited by Hilary Walton and Hazel Holt, Pym's sister and her friend and literary executor. The sections chosen from Pym's unpublished papers, along with the editorial comments, seem determined to demonstrate Pym as a nice and well balanced person. This view may even be essentially accurate, but the work as a whole did not further any notion of Pym as a serious novelist; instead we were treated to more anecdotes about how and cozy life in England can be. Beyond this autobiography a growing number of critical studies have been published since Pym's death in 1980. It is the purpose of this essay to briefly survey the next step in the acceptance of Pym by the Academy, the book-length study of the author. Even here, however, the critics seem divided as to whether Pym is a serious novelist or merely a charming friend, more prized for eccentricity than intellect. This mixed reaction