Hollow Men Research Articles

الانزياح التركيبي والدلالي في اللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية

This paper aims to investigate syntactic and semantic deviation in English and Arabic represented by two poems: the Arabic poem is (Weapons and Children) by Al Sayyab and the English one is ''The Hollow Men'' by Eliot.

Metaphysical Elements in T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion, The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday

Abstract: This article attempts to find out whether T.S. Eliot employs in three of his selected poems, “Gerontion,” “The Hollow Men” and “Ash Wednesday” poetic devices that were employed by the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Poetic devices such as conceits, metaphors, similes, paradoxes, unified sensibility, concentration, erudition, obscurity, compression, allusions, etc., have indeed been detected in the poems. With the help of these metaphysical poetic devices Eliot has been able to effectively portray in his poems the modern civilization marked by industrialization, urbanization, fragmentation, and moral degeneration. Eliot juxtaposes and amalgamates complex and disparate elements and brings out complex but meaningful wholes.

The Psychoanalytic study of traumatic psyches of Tomas of “The Unbearable lightness of being” and Blanche Du Bois of “A Streetcar named Desire”

T. S. Eliot in his most acclaimed work ‘The Hollow Men’ very rightly mentioned that “This is the way the world ends, Not with the bang but with the whimper” , the slow and gradual crumbling of the universe is what the characters covered within the ambit of this paper experiences. The two characters i.e Tomas from Milan Kundera’s chef d’ oeuvre, ‘The Unbearable lightness of being’ and Blanche Du Bois from Tennessee Williams masterpiece ‘A streetcar named Desire’ have one thing in common that both of them were challenging the existing normative behavioral pattern and was trying to make things seem content in the disillusioned universe. Both Tomas and Blanche can be seen as portraying the image of the disillusioned modern men/women lost in the realm of something in between the unstable private or personal and the hostile Public realms. Amidst the upheavals and turmoil Kundera’s protagonist was searching for the meaning of the ‘self’ and on the other side Blanche was assertive towards her feminine sensibility. This research work will attempt a psychoanalytic study of the progression of the characters and will attempt an analysis that how their assertive ‘self’ suffered a tragic end. This paper will further discuss the ‘Oedipus’ like fate of Tomas arising due to his ill judgments and the development of Masculinity complex in Blanche Du Bois while highlighting the interplay of Animus leading to her tragic fate.

Psychoanalytic Reading of Decadence and Crisis in Ted Hughes’ “Relic” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”

This research employs psychoanalytic methods to explore themes of decadence and crisis in Ted Hughes’ “Relic” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”. Drawing from Freudian and Jungian theories, it delves into the psychological aspects to reveal expressions of the despair of modernity. The paper illustrates underlying psychological decay within the poems, examining subconscious motives, suppressed desires, and conflicts. Through this exploration, intricate psychological states contributing to perceptions of crisis come to light. Highlighting these literary pieces as reflections of contemporary turmoil, the poems expose the erosion of both individual and collective identities. By using the lens of psychoanalysis, a deeper understanding of the interplay between the human psyche and society emerges, offering insights into the profound implications of modern decadence and crisis. Ultimately, the application of psychoanalysis enriches comprehension of the connections between psychological intricacies and societal disintegration, shedding light on the significance of the poets’ selected works

Of Wastelands and Ecopoetics: An Ecocritical Reading of T. S. Eliot’s Poetry.

This article is an ecocritical study of three of T. S. Eliot’s most notable works: “The Waste Land”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and “The Hollow Men”. The poems are analyzed in detail and in relation with one another to highlight Eliot’s understanding of man’s relationship with nature through an elemental, ecomythical, and ecoreligious study. The article pursues a pattern in Eliot’s writing of a Man-Nature relationship as it focuses on the ways in which nature interacts with and influences man’s life, emotions, and faith.

Men’s Spiritual Vacuity and Inefficacy in Eliot’s Poem The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men by Eliot is a widely read poem which is structured of five sections. These sections deal with a group of hollow men unable to communicate with one another, a hollow man who is afraid to look at others directly, the barren land where they cannot fulfill their desire, their unwillingness to look at others and to be looked at by them,and finally a nursery rhyme which they can’t recite completely respectively. They are unable to think, create, respond and act because of the shadow that falls in between them.This article primarily explores men’s spiritual vacuity and inefficacy in this poem. It is an episodic free verse poem which reflects the poet’s pessimistic vision towards the human life and the present world. The poet presents the men as effigies which lack human efficiency and the world as a dead cactus land lacking the spring of blooms and joys. It reflects the conditions and contexts of modern men through divergent allusions. Men feel helpless and lonely despite being in a group, find no senses and meanings in spite of their assertions, realize their inefficiency and inability despite their sound health and certificates, feel unfortunate and miserable in spite of their material advancement and wealth, and find death in their lives despite being alive.

Exploration of the Hollowness of the Modern Men in T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925): An Analytical Approach

T.S. Eliot has reached a stage of maturity in which he confirms the hollowness of the modern men. This realization may be due to his strong religious belief and his personal experience. His religious belief is a mixture of his previous belief and his new religious belief and these have been clear in “The Hollow Men”. Also his personal experience is quite rich as he has lived in the US and moved to England as well as visited Germany and France. Eliot has started the poems with two epigraphs which carry significant meanings and the beginning of the poem is a great stage as it contains the confession of the modern hollow men who act as Mr. Kirtz of The Heart of Darkness . Modern man is empty of spirituality, religion and real love as Eliot presented it in “The Hollow Men”. A textual approached is used along with a historical approach to explore the emptiness and hollowness of the modern man. It was found out that Eliot did not mean to humiliate the hollow men, but he rather praises them for repenting from their sins.

‘Uncommonly Silly Law’ and Hollow Men: A Critique of the Legalistic Interpretation of Time-Limit Clause by the Kenyan Court of Appeal

The constitution of kenya calls for a shift from literal interpretation to a realist-cum- value oriented approach to statutory interpretation and eschews a positivist interpretation that would view the constitution as value-less or value neutral. The minimalist approach that was in the pre-2010 era (the ‘mechanical or phonographic’) is therefore not in line with the demands of our constitution. By dint of Article 10, judges are not subordinated to the legislature and not merely programmed to pronounce the law like music lyrics. The paper will however show that the court of Appeal judges in Aprim Consultants reduced themselves to mere hollow men empty of the pursuit of substantive justice. Primarily, the paper critiques the way the Court of appeal interpreted a time limit clause to cause an injustice. The paper applauds the approach followed by the High Court which gives effect to the constitutional values and access to justice

The accounting meta-metaphor of the Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

PurposeUsing the theory of sensibility and McClelland et al.’s (2013) metaphorical analysis, this study aims to analyse the accounting metaphors and meta-metaphor of The Hollow Men, a poem written by T. S. Eliot.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis uses McClelland et al.’s (2013) five-step procedure to ascertain the poem’s metaphor use.FindingsThe Hollow Men depicts accountants as ritualistic and accounting voices as quiet and meaningless while its meta-metaphor conveys accounting as rites and shadows.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough The Hollow Men’s use of Form 4 metaphors, where neither figurative nor literal source term is named, places an onus on the reader to infer meaning from accounting metaphor use, the analysis provides readers with a valuable structure for evincing accounting metaphors that present pervasive accounting issues facing the modern world.Practical implicationsAccountants, according to The Hollow Men, are hollow, devotees to plunderers and property and rain dancers. The Hollow Men situates the quest for accounting as a ritual for order and the preservation of the status quo.Social implicationsThe Hollow Men’s mages of accounting immersion in rites and shadows accord with the conceptual metaphors of accounting as magic and accounting as history.Originality/valueThe originality of this study rests in its introduction to McClelland et al.’s (2013) metaphorical analysis of accounting research.

My Life with Hawthorne

My Life with Hawthorne

Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions by David Stephen Calonne

 Reviews (p. ). Having married and moved permanently to England, Eliot is reborn as the satirical and apocalyptic prophet of the Sweeney poems, e Waste Land, and finally ‘e Hollow Men’, which he told his brother was his only ‘blasphemous poem’ (p. ), since its subject is despair. is central period is treated in Chapters –, from which one comes with a fresh appreciation of the difficult ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ and of the ‘in-betweenness’ of ‘e Hollow Men’ (p. ). roughout her study, Brooker quotes from the Eliot texts recovered by recent editorial projects , which have been less studied because of their previous unavailability but also because Eliot’s major work is now nearly a century old, just as Don Juan was to the author of e Waste Land, and therefore much criticism has pursued other, more fashionable courses. Brooker’s book, on the other hand, is likely to be permanently useful. e Clark Lectures have been available for years, but it is again a shock to find Eliot telling his audience how spurious is John Donne’s ‘e Ecstasy’ (p. )—the term of comparison being inevitably Dante. is new asceticism is a prelude to Eliot’s second ‘conversion’, to Anglo-Catholicism, which Brooker considers in the light of his return to the USA in  and consequent disillusion and discovery of the impossibility of returning. is is shown to be the point of the opening passage of ‘Burnt Norton’ about ‘what might have been and what has been’ (Collected Poems – (London: Faber, ), p. ). Illusion and negation are present dialectically in the hesitant yet affirmative war Quartets (Chapters –), where no statement is final and yet Eliot is able, with the help of Dante, Augustine, and the quasi-heretical Julian of Norwich, to offer a glimpse of an ultimately satisfying theodicy. U  S  G M B Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions. By D S C. London: Bloomsbury. . ix+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. What to do with the uncategorizable? In an increasingly tagable, cell-filling, algorithm-based world, the question poses problems not just for the librarian, the teacher, the publisher, and other canon-makers, but also for the reader whose mind may not be readily apt to a constantly unfolding, barely graspable, holistic appreciation of a person—let alone that person’s life work. David Stephen Calonne addresses the complexity of such a pursuit as a sort of side project to this monograph ’s larger work: that of sharing the ‘hidden religions’ of Diane Di Prima’s ‘visionary poetics’, attributing it oen to a truly ‘creative’ sensibility (p. ). is is an in-depth study of an explicitly, intentionally untraceable poetics; it challenges its readers further by offering encyclopedic glosses of difficult, complex thoughtsystems . Calonne has made a career of single-author studies, and in this new contribution to his analysis of Beat poets, he does not offer the whole, finished picture which a novice reader might require; rather, he embarks on an intense MLR, .,   and sometimes hurried journey through systems of thought, religions, figures, life choices, and politics. At times, Calonne rattles through series of punctuationless lines, because a sort of magic is at stake in the discussion. However, there is a risk that the poetry itself gets le behind. Like many studies with ‘poetics’ in their title, this work on Di Prima focuses on the unfolding of a philosophy rather than a poetry. Close readings oen yield to narratives, timelines, and diary entries. is is especially true in Chapters  and , but the whole book showcases excerpts of Di Prima’s prose, perhaps even more than her poetry. Di Prima was in conversation with so many various forms of art and artists, yet consistently chose poetry as her medium. Chapter , for example, situates her physically within a New York scene, drawing connections both professional and situational between her and the poets, artists, musicians, and dancers she associated with on various levels, but it does not necessarily read the forms or implications of their aesthetics into hers. Rather, what this book does is show an arc of personal and philosophical growth, recording the power—dense, layered, rich, suggestive—of the various fields of resonance in...

The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein

Reviewed by: The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein Joey Frantz (bio) The Gist of Reading, by Andrew Elfenbein (Stanford University Press, 2018), 272 pp. Andrew Elfenbein's The Gist of Reading isn't about meticulous, erudite, critical reading. It's about what literary reading is like for most readers most of the time. What exactly goes on in someone's head when they read, say, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? The gist of The Gist of Reading is that readers forget most of what they read but construct a "gist representation" that boils a text down to its essentials. This, alone, is obvious, but the questions Elfenbein is interested in are: (1) what is remembered, and what is forgotten? and (2) how can we know? He takes both psychological and historical approaches. The psychological [End Page 150] approaches are ambitious and promising but lack explanatory power, while the historical angle is merely illuminating. A Victorian literary scholar and professor of English, Elfenbein sought training in experimental psychology so he could ask basic questions about reading. For example, how can we know what word association really is? One way is to ask experimental test subjects to make what's called a lexical decision, that is, to present them with words and see how quickly they can decide whether a word is real or made up. It turns out that people identify a word as being real more quickly if it is preceded by a related word, i.e., they are more likely to identify bird as a real word if it was preceded by sparrow than if it was preceded by an unrelated word. What makes this finding interesting is that this effect holds true even if the first word (such as sparrow before bird) was presented so briefly that test subjects had no conscious awareness of having seen it. Elfenbein glosses over many studies related to sound (such as alliteration and rhyme); other studies deal with how test subjects make sense of what they read. Though provocative, such research is hard to use in a more specific, literary context. One reason is that whatever unconscious work goes into the reading process cannot, by definition, be verified by readers; unconscious means unconscious. When I read "The Hollow Men," the unconscious work that goes into understanding "A penny for the old guy" isn't something I can report on. Alas, Elfenbein falls into the familiar trap of making banal claims imbued with an aura of technical precision. For example, Elfenbein works with the distinction between online reading experiences (how we experience a text as we read it) versus offline experiences (how our brain processes a text once we're done with it). He uses the concept of a situation model to describe a reader's representation of what's going on in a text. These terms are useful in and of themselves. But consider how Elfenbein uses them in this sentence: The offline retrievability of long-term situation models may depend on online "depth of processing." Since "offline" means "after we're done reading the text" and "situation models" means "mental models of what happened in a text," this sentence simply means that how well you remember what happens in a text may depend on how deeply you read it. Another term, activation, is used in research on memory, but in this specific sentence, activation just dresses up a mundane idea: Depending on the reader, emotional sympathy with certain concepts or the ability to connect concepts to personal experience may increase activation. [End Page 151] The problem isn't that Elfenbein wants to interweave psychology and criticism; the problem is that the psychology doesn't always provide new insights. In a particularly egregious moment, Elfenbein actually offers an equation to describe how entertaining a text is: entertainment value = A (interest) + B (self-relevance) + C (transportation) This is offered as "a model that has predictive value," but it simply does not. Of course Elfenbein would not claim that the values of the equation could be calculated precisely, but since "interest," "self-relevance," and "transportation" are fuzzy concepts, the equation is woefully imprecise and reeks of Physics Envy. Elfenbein seems to admit...

T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker

Reviewed by: T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker John Tamilio III (bio) T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination Jewel Spears Brooker Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $49.95 hardcover. In the introduction to T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker notes that, “We are in the dawn of a renaissance in Eliot studies because the long-restricted archival material is now being published in critical editions” (3). Among this material is the two-volume annotated editions of Eliot’s published and unpublished poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, the multivolume letters edited by John Haffenden, and The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, which consists of eight critical editions edited by numerous Eliot scholars with Ronald Schuchard as the general editor (Brooker is coeditor of volumes one and eight). Just recently, the much anticipated letters between Eliot and Emily Hale have been made available through the Princeton University Library. Brooker draws upon this scholarship, especially the prose volumes, in her rigorous analysis of the dialectic she perceives in a sampling of Eliot’s major poems and criticism. She begins with Eliot’s first seminal piece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and works her way through to his masterpiece Four Quartets, spending scrutinous time probing other anthologized pieces, such as The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Ash Wednesday. Some of Eliot’s student poems, lectures, and his dissertation on F. H. Bradley are also examined. Brooker’s analysis is as meticulous as it is innovative, yielding fresh insight into a poet who many feel is indecipherable unless, of course, one finds meaning in the sentiments Eliot evokes in the reader. One cannot read this study without thinking about Hegel, whom Brooker references just once (47). Granted, Hegel focused on the telos of history: how history is moving toward a unified purpose that humanity would understand from an eschatological position. This is part of what Eliot means in his Four Quartets, which begin: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past” (“Burnt Norton” I, ll. 1–3). This construct is part of the dialectic that Brooker explores in this study and is one of her critical refrains. Using a similar methodology, Brooker develops her cogent claim that Eliot tends to think in triads and that “[t]he dialectical imagination is by definition triadic, a structure that in itself nudges the mind to move beyond contradictions” (120). It moves beyond contradictions in two ways: by arriving at a new thesis, à la the Hegelian paradigm, or by remaining comfortable in the imbalance. But the phrase arriving at is where Brooker would differ in her analysis: throughout the book she uses the term transcends. Such a [End Page 223] distinction is central to her analysis of Eliot. Throughout his work and religious maturation, Eliot thought within a dialectic paradigm. Brooker notes that “the psycho-physical dualism that had troubled Eliot from the beginning of his life as a poet” remained with him (116). The serious believer should not find this strange. Christian Theology lives and grows within a dialectic imagination: the tension of living in the now and the not-yet; of worshipping a God who is present in absence and absent in presence; of serving a Savior who, through the act of kenosis, redeems humanity. Eliot lived within this tension and found that surmounting physical, psychological, emotional, temporal, and of course spiritual quandaries was attained through transcendence. Towards the end of the third section of “East Coker,” Eliot compares opposite states of being and offers a solution: “In order to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy” (III, ll. 35–37ff). This pattern pervaded Eliot’s thinking. Brooker shows how Eliot addressed philosophical, spiritual, emotional, and spatiotemporal predicaments in his verse with the goal being to find a third way: to transcend the dilemma in which he was enmeshed or to live, however uncomfortably, in the imbalance. In his early verse, Eliot was drawn to existential questions and the “gap between intellect and...

A Satirical Reading of Wole Soyinka’s <i>A Play of Giants</i>

Satire is the literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards its attitudes manner in which the follies and foibles or vices are unmasked by the satirist. The great modern age of satire was the neo-classic period when the satiric spirit was everywhere present and a return was made to formal verse satire. This paper examines how Soyinka has responded to the socio-political and economic situation in Africa by creating A Play of Giants. It also examines how Soyinka, a sensitive playwright, in A Play of Giants mirrors events in the African society in such a daring and imaginative manner by satirizing them. The findings reveal that Soyinka presents his characters as hollow men to show their worthlessness and emptiness despite being at the helms of power. Soyinka reveals the hollowness of the characters exposing their linguistic incompetence. This study identifies some devices technically deployed by Soyinka to include irony, humour, wit, sarcasm and symbolism. Through the use of satire, Soyinka targets African political leaders who have become monsters because of the powers they wield. Wole Soyinka uses satire to raise the consciousness of the people and prick the conscience of the ruling political elite in Africa.

Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes and Otherness in the Book of Judges, written by Robin Baker, 2016

Hollow Men, Strange Women: Riddles, Codes and Otherness in the Book of Judges, written by Robin Baker, 2016

Refleksje o fotografii w twórczości Chrisa Markera

Photography plays a special role in Chris Marker's entire work, from the photo-novel “La Jetée” to the installation titled “The Hollow Men”. The author builds reflection on photography and image in reference to the concepts of movement/stillness and memory/forgetfulness. As a consequence, she emphasizes the autobiographical and self-reflective nature of Marker’s artistic realizations, in many cases realizing the features of an essay. The author of the text proposes an analysis of the practices that Marker applies to photography; she considers how he incorporates photography or an image with the characteristics of photography in his works – which are varied in technique or in used medium and which were arising at different periods of time. The purpose of the article is to outline a certain framework for analyzing the Marker's creative strategies and to introduce theoretical assumptions that can be used to interpret particular works of the artist.

James and Eliot: ‘… without motion’

EARLY in The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy is described: ‘She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass.’ Two dozen years later, a similar formula appears early in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’: Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion …

Art Versus Racism: T. S Eliot’s the Hollow Men and Black Identity

The Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot refers to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, among other literary and historical sources in his well-known poem entitled The Hollow Men. The link of this poem to his earlier works in the neo-Metaphysical tradition has already been established by various scholars and critics of twentieth century English literature. What eludes the awareness of Eliot's readers is the specific relevance of his verse style to White supremacists' apprehension of issues which concern poetry, culture and society in the West. One central theme of The Hollow Men is duncehood insofar as this human condition reveals itself in supposedly meaningless or barren engagements like rustic dance, singing, verbal (folk) expression and festivity outside a typically European landscape. In previous studies, literary commentators have failed to read Eliot's poem correctly by relating it to the behavior of African-Americans of Harlem Renaissance, or of Blacks in exile generally. This study is an analysis and interpretation of Eliot's writing that suggests his racial bigotry and intolerance, but everything can be seen in terms of the Western conservative outlook on politics, culture, and man's destiny in the modern world.

'After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?' : "The Hollow Men"におけるKurtz的世界との訣別

'After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?' : "The Hollow Men"におけるKurtz的世界との訣別

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.