Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land I

The Waste Land (hereafter TWL) - similar scope to Paradise Lost - secondary and tertiary associations...

cf Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring - dissonance/disharmony -> antagonising people
TWL - counter-rhythm / couterharmony

Epic and imagistic at the same time

Title page -> Mallory's La Morte D'Arthur -> the search for a sign...
Eliot talked about the "mythic method" - structure for something devoid of narrative -> cf Ulysses...
The Fisher King - wounded (usually, according to myth, in his genitals - his land became waste (fertility links, with Christian elements - redeem/restore the land)

Coherence of the poem // Fragmented
Modernism // Post-modernism
Modm - Allows for a dramatic reading, but from reading the manuscripts we can see that Pound cut out a lot of the original - he made it... But he cut out a lot of the crap - turning it inot a imagistic dramatic masterpiece.
Post-Modm - Celebrates fragmentation (but after Pound cut out the parts - it was a lot less fragmented before Pound deleted parts of it).

geronition: quote from Measure for Measure

The field: "The Potter's Field" - Judas bought with his 30 pieces of silver... Overgrown, grass/weeds/rocks ... and a goat. Moral overgrowth?

goats/sheep:
Goats - those who have passed over
Sheep - still alive? (not been passed over)

The modernist aesthetic -? Joycean detail ("demented particulars" - Beckett)

Infans -> unable to speak/hear
The Word within a word unable to speak a word

Christ the tiger -> cf Blake - "tyger burning bright" -> the eternal energy of the kosmos.

[TWL: econciles personal and impersonal: Part 2 more personal (3-part structure) - Eliot's dramatic sense of his 1st marriage...]

*Proust - involuntary memory - much more intense* (this comes up again and again in the course...)
I: Involuntary memory in a hyacinth garden (I'll come back to this later)
II: Dramatic present