Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: Existentialism and The Waste Land (original) (raw)

The Land and the Waste: Meaninglessness and Absurdity in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

sjesr

After the World War-1, there spread chaos and disillusionment in society, faith got shattered and life became meaningless. Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of Existentialism is based on this meaninglessness and absurdity. Man faces an absurd and meaningless existence in this chaotic world. Thus these two are the main tropes of Sartre’s philosophy. T. S. Eliot also lived in that chaotic age and composed his long narrative poem The Waste Land (1930) after the World War. This poem is based on the consequences of the war that caused absurdity and chaos depriving human life of real significance and value. This study explores and analyses these aspects of meaninglessness and absurdity in The Waste Land (1930) in the light of Sartre’s philosophy and contends to say that almost all of the characters presented in the poem encounter meaningless and chaotic lives. Their lives are without any real purpose and are quite insignificant in a chaotic and disorderly world. So the land is full of the waste ...

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ALLUSIONS AND SYMBOLS IN THE POEM "THE WASTELAND" BY THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

Modern man is spiritually hollow and barren; he is just like a robot that follows the pre-assigned tasks. He wakes up early in the morning, changes his dress, takes his breakfast, goes to office, takes his lunch, returns to his home, spends time with family, takes dinner, goes to his bed and next day in the morning again follows the same routine. Modern man is inhabitant of Wasteland, although he has gained progress in science and materialistic culture, yet he has no values, he is spiritually dead. He has only one eye of Commerce his spiritual eye is closed, so he is spiritually blind. Few of the reasons for modern man's destruction are sex perversities and gambling, making false love and religious waywardness. He is confined to his routine work and helpless to act upon his religious doctrines or moral values. Religion is the only way to get deliverance, man is mortal he can be immortal just like the Holy Christ by adopting the message of God. The poem "The Wasteland" digs the graves of ancients and shows us their immoral activities, waywardness and spiritual barrenness and this is the great craftsmanship of the poet. Through the symbolic and allusive analysis of this poem the researcher will try to show the images of hollowness and barrenness in the present age.

The Abject in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

2021

T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, discusses hopelessness and desolation and shuns them at every turn. The speakers spurn it and despair at the desolate state of humankind and society. This paper aims to read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in light of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance. The main claim is that despite the apparent horror of desolation, the more the poem tries to repel desolation, the more it cannot help but repeatedly allude to it, as if unwillingly drawn to it, so that death and desolation are not the subject, nor are they the object, but rather the abject of the poem. The sections of the poem I feel are most relevant for such an analysis are “The Burial of the Dead” (lines 1-30) and “What the Thunder Said” (lines 322-375).

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Anticlimax of Modern Life in a Claustrophobic World

Galaxy Journal , 2014

The postwar disillusionment of the 1920s led many literary figures to voice out the predicament and moral dilemma that modern life faces. Of many poets of war, T.S. Eliot is a distinguished figure and a leading voice in picturing the crises of the time known as ‘age of worry’. His groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land (1922) appears like an earthquake and deconstructs the structure of modernism and everything it offered. It portrays a claustrophobic world where regeneration and hopefulness seem far-fetched. This ‘disease of the age’ becomes the core issue of the poem. Eliot follows the ‘mythical method’ in the poem and connects existing panoramic setbacks of modern life to antiquities. Thus, it implies a reproachful question on modernism. Exposing a picture of mundane wasteland that symbolically suggests the spiritual death of modern men, Eliot ties the malaise with the eternal human problem and looks East for a possible remedy.

Modern Life as a Waste Land in Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract T.S. Eliot began writing The Waste Land in the autumn of 1921. T. S. Eliot‟s The Waste Land is the most significant and representative poem of the twentieth century. It exposes the very soul of modern generation with all its horrors, moral, spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy, disillusionment and waste. It particularly exposes the horror of war and the waste and rigidity that accompany and follow the modern warfare. The main theme of the poem is life-in-death. It suggests the living death of the inhabitants of The Waste Land. Throughout the poem, it is evident that man is shown to have lost his passion, i.e, his faith in God and religion, his passion participation in religion and this decay of faith has resulted in the loss of vitality, both spiritual and emotional. Keywords: The Waste Land, Theme, Life –in-death, modern generation

T.S. Eliot's Way Out of "The Waste Land

Linguistics and Literature Studies

This paper is dedicated to a centennial anniversary of the publication of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the poem that marks the beginning of modernism in literature and still remains one of the most influential and discussed poems of the XXth century. In this poem, Eliot examines the fundamental values of human existence. In the example of the generation of-lost souls‖, he describes the disintegration of life and moral standards, as well as strives to find a way for reconciliation with existential problems by examining the existent reality so as to make subsequent reintegration in order to continue life. Religious revelations are seen as the eternal wisdom that has never been hidden from man of any cultural tradition, and the point from which spiritual revival may start. Consequently, the method of comparative mythology was applied to the analysis of the content of the poem. A century after its publication, the poem has not lost its significance due to the depth of its penetration into the nature of human vices that corrupt human existence and the philosophical problems they engender. Unlike most previous studies that accentuated the motifs of despair, distress, and loss of hope as the main motifs of the poem, the paper stresses Eliot's search for ways out of the existing crisis, which represents the novelty of the paper, as well as its social implications.

Eliot CSS 12 4 0048 WORD.doc. A semiotic key to The Waste Land

Chinese Semiotic Studies, 2016

This paper applies my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre's theory of the semiotic structure of modern poetry to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Contrary to Riffaterre, multilingual examples show that modern poetry is built around not one but two central propositions. Moreover, the ability of the modernist work to change the preconceptions of the reader must be accounted for. This involves a triadic system whose interpretant is seen to have a counterpart in the sociolect, which has similar vocabulary but contrasting internal structure-a contrast that produces a change in the mind of the reader. My analysis shows that this long poem is based on just two kernel propositions, which generate two sets of variant images throughout the text. The result is that the poem has the capacity to change the reader's preconceptions along religious lines. This influential poem has frequently been misunderstood as simply reflecting the depredations of post First World War Europe. From my analysis we can conclude that, while one proposition is concerned with the degraded state of faithless postwar European society, the other constitutes a semiotic key to the rehabilitation of that society.