Research and Criticism: Departmental Journal of English, BHU,New Series, Volume 4 (2013) Prepages containing Contents page and the editorial (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Money Matters:” Betrayal in The Waste Land: A Tribute/ Sukhbir Singh
Critics have advanced multiple modes of understanding T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) from the personal, impersonal, Christian, Indic, philosophical, psychological, mythical and cultural angles. However, no commentator has so far paid due attention to yet another mode of understanding the poem--the muted echoes of Eliot's sense of betrayal over his wife Vivienne's adulterous affair with his former teacher Bertrand Russell in the early years of their married life. The Eliot scholars generally examine the theme of betrayal in The Waste Land as mere literary examples either of the past moral profligacy or of the prevalent sexual perversion in the modern world. The key aspect of betrayal in Eliot's poem remains to a great extent underestimated, although not completely unnoticed. I submit in this essay that several episodes in The Waste Land indeed signify the betrayal theme as Eliot's personal 'grouse' against Vivienne and Russell who indulged in a guilty sexual liaison behind his back. These instances in Eliot's poem even suggest that he inherently wanted to revenge the betrayal upon the two defaulters but preferred not to at that point of time. Nevertheless, Eliot did fulfill his secret wish for retaliation against the culprits much later-in a manner as conceived earlier-in The Waste land.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A Perspective on Indian Thoughts
2014
In this paper an attempt has been made to trace the utterances of Indian thoughts in Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land to judge how far oriental wisdom transforms Eliot’s poetic vision and sensibility to provide it a universal undertone running parallel with the wisdom of Europe. In order to analyze the impact of Indian thoughts on Eliot’s mind, a rigorous speculation of formative grounds of Oriental Study Center at Harvard and Eliot’s connection with such mentors like Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, Charles Rockwell Lanman, and James Haughton have been taken into account. After analyzing the formation of Eliot’s Indian sensibility with its Christian intent at its core, each part of the poem has been studied in order to understand how meticulously Eliot portrays the tragic impasset of modern humanity due to spiritual draught and how at each stage Indian thoughts, specifically Buddhism, and Hinduism with its Vedic and Upanishadic lore stand as yardstick to restore spiritualism by ...
The Waste Land: Eliot’s Neo-Empire
Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature
Thomas Stearns Eliot's The Waste Land is a mysterious enigmatic text in both its form and content which still invites many critics and reviewers to an infinite range of interpretations finding in it a striking departure from nineteenth century poetry and raising the flag of modernism and postmodernism. Its appearance in 1922 started a critical debate among critics who found it hard to place both because of the poet's complex artistic strategies and because of the poem's kaleidoscopic orchestrated structure. From this perspective, the present paper is mainly concerned with the poem’s kaleidoscopic structure highlighting the text's intertextuality, heterogeneity and multiculturalism. It seeks to re-read and investigate the poem from the perspective of Edward Said's Postcolonial theory proving that the poem’s encyclopedic structure achieves for the poet a form of Neo-Colonialism where the poet’s intellectual domination replaces the territorial one. The study conclud...
T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land as World Literature in Marathi
100 Years of The Waste Land: Indian Responses, 2023
.S. Eliot’s ideas in general and The Wasteland in particular are integral to the twentieth century world literature. The impact of T.S. Eliot’s critical ideas as well as his poetry is immense on major literary languages across the world in general and Indian languages and Marathi in particular, though these languages are peripheral to world-literary polysystem. Eliot’s critical views as well as his poems like The Wasteland has an effective life as world literature and is a significant ‘intervention’ in Evan-Zohar’s sense of the term in evolution of Marathi literary polysystem as this essay seeks to demonstrate. In Marathi, while Eliot’s ideas especially from ‘The Tradition and Individual Talent’ have been influential in formulation of modernist aesthetics in and there are scattered critical comments on his works, a full-fledged translation of The Wasteland appeared only as recently as 2019. However, if we understand translation as a kind of rewriting along with forms of rewritings like commentaries and critical writings, we can understand these scattered comments and articles themselves as being ‘translational’ in nature assimilating a new poetic of modernism into the horizons of the Marathi reader’s horizons of expectations as well as in contesting the claims of prevailing aesthetics norms by breaching its autonomy and authority (E.V. Ramakrishnan, 2017, 239). While modernist poetics in Marathi was developed by renowned writers and literary scholars like B.S. Mardhekar, P.S. Rege, Vinda Karandikar, Dilip Chitre , Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vilas Sarang by substantially drawing upon the international poetic formulations of modernism especially those by T.S. Eliot, with the exception of P.S. Rege, Vilas Sarang and Mahesh Elkunchwar no other writer or scholar has explicitly acknowledged the debt to Eliot. Though very useful, the recent extant translation and the explanatory paratextual material does not spell out the contemporary relevance of the Eliot’s poem to the Marathi readers and the writers in the second decade of the twenty first century unlike what critical essays by Sarang, P.S. Rege and Elkunchwar did for their periods. The themes of fragmentation of reality and culture, trivialization of erotic life, complex negotiations between tradition and modern talents, relationship between scholarship and creativity , quest for spiritual transcendence, globalization of culture, disillusionment with the political condition and the possibility of violence are still extremely relevant in the era of intensified modernity with its growing digitization( of VR and Meta) and deep mediatization (to use Andreas Hepp’s term ) of contemporary life , the rise of majoritarian supremacism through democratic processes, and the phenomenal growth of toxic il-literacy ( as against less harmful non-literacy of the past) not only through private TV and social media but also through the collapsed educational system in this country. Keywords: T.S. Eliot, Modernism. The Wasteland, Marathi Literature, Indian modernity, Indian Modernism , World Literature,
For those who have studied The Waste Land, Eliot's literary endeavor to create meaning from historical tradition is a part of the standard interpretive discourse. Highlighting the decay of civilization in the modern world, the poem stands to be a profound criticism of an evershifting, post-war culture. However, through Eliot's fragmented poetry, the construction of multiple voices in the poem, and the plethora of cultural and historical references, readers of the piece must grapple with the author's obfuscation to ascertain Eliot's cultural criticism contained within The Waste Land. Jonathan Bishop states in his article, "A Handful of Words: The Credibility of Language in the Waste Land," that "The world has long since accepted Eliot's poem as the master work of a major poet without ever quite being able to agree on what exactly it was a classic of" (Bishop 154). It is for this reason that interpretive work must be done on Eliot's Waste Land; however, before delving into analysis of the poem, the theoretical argumentation of this paper must first be established.
Criticism in our own century has had a complicated history but it is possible to discern two fairly distinct lines of development: an Arnoldian tradition which emphasizes the moral and societal dimensions of literature, and a Coleridgean tradition which emphasizes formal structure. Each has been fruitful and important. The New Criticism, which held front stage in classes of literature for some forty years, has contributed to the study of literature; it made critics approach the literary work. Like Arnold, Coleridge had reflected deeply on some of the same problems of the culture of his own day. He was, or tried to be, the conscience of society. His writings on church and state, on government, on the nature of science, on history and current affairs, on philosophy and religion, are all, at least in part, attempts to bring philosophical and moral principles to bear on the workings of modern society. Arnold, in his pursuit of "high seriousness," was preoccupied with the moral and societal dimensions of literature. He had little interest in formal structure or in the genesis of the literary work. His concern was with the implications of a work for the intellectual and spiritual growth of the individual and of society.