Anglo-American Literature Survey

« Survey III Modernist Poetry in Britain: T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land Modernism Modernism has been defined as a movement and a literary form.

It is about formal style, but also a reaction to the culture and society that created it.

It started with Marx, Freud, Darwin, the first world war, etc and responds to the scenario of our chaos, and revolts against traditional realism. Scientific and thinkers changed the way humanity saw itself; we are just animals controlled by our unconscious. Subjectivity shows that things are not fixed, one’s subjectivity can be different from someone else’s. 1922 is the Annus Mirabilis of Modernism.

Three important texts:  Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room where she changes the way she writes.  James Joyce’s Ulysses where he pushes modernism to its most difficult point.  T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land where poetry rips off the tradition. We need to let modernism remind us of how far we’ve come and where we seem to move forward to. T.S Eliot In Tradition and the Individual Talent he reflects on his role as a poet.

One’s needs to understand the past in order to have an impact on the future.

Literature is an important document about the consciousness of one’s own time.

The important meaning is the one it has for the reader.

Eliot gives the reader a lot of power.

All that authors can offer is their own vision of things, and readers will approach it with their subjectivity. The Waste Land There is a complete instability of the I voice.

The person keeps wondering what should they do, the speaker is confused.

There are different languages, different voices.

But who are they? Confusion is everywhere, and it is the most typical reaction to life in the waste land. Subjects are profoundly alienated from both themselves and from others.

We can only understand other people through subjectivity.

It is the ability to see things from other perspectives. Elio makes the ordinary seem strange, there is an existential panic. Ezra Pound Modernist poet who created imagism.

He changed the initial title of The Waste Land that was originally He do the Police in different Voices.

Why is the sentence not grammatically correct? It is a quote from Dicken’s novel.

The voice is the way to interiority, to communication with other people. It links to a question; is the poem a work of political engagement (satire, doing the police) or a confession of a traumatised émigré, person? Traumatised recalls the first world war.

People responded with ‘madness’ to the things changing. American Modernism, or Modernism High and Low Modernism is about time being broken, at that time there was something radically wrong with human history.

Modernism rejects the past.

Modernism asks to pay attention to the ordinary, to the small things of life that we consider unimportant.

It proposes to find a new sense to the world. Wallace Steven His Anecdote of the Jar was published in 1917, when the first world war was raging in Europe.

It is a response to it. It is written on the rhythm of iambic tetrameter, but rags regular time in which the poem would take place in a regular form.

It plays with time and representation. It is about a jar, an ordinary object, but industrial that has a perfection in its form that does not exist in nature.

We need to pay attention to the objects that surround us. 1. »