Section outline

  • Hints of every theory

    Tuesday Read: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land a second time.  This time we are looking for a spot in the poem that could be about what critics have said modernism is about.  Each person will select one of the topics below to look for; if two people want to look for the same topic, that will be ok.  You may feel a topic takes up a whole page or just appears in a couple of words.  Don't think there is a "right answer."  

    1. The medium: lines in the poem that could be taken as simply being examples of writing or art, not lines "about" anything else

    2.  The failure of language or the failure of culture

    3. Beauty--lines or structures of the work that are pleasing 

    4. Suffrage: women gaining power; working class people stepping into this high-culture poem

    5. Historical events: Britain's past; any other past;  World War I; the communist revolution 

    6. Collective identity--or the blurring together of individuals

    7.  Multiple cultures--particularly non-European ones

    8. horror movie imagery--things that are terrifying or distorted or weird  

    9.  The unconscious--things that usually are buried in the mind; or things that could be memories from early childhood

    10. Sexuality

    11. religion

    12. A vision of a new kind of human being emerging

    13. Economics--anything about money, wealth, poverty 

    14. technology

    15. nature

    16. the author's life