Bones in the Waste Land English Literature
Bones In The Waste Land English Literature Essay
In the movie Spiderman 2 (2004), Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, gets in to a conversation with Dr. Otto Octavious, the scientist, who later morphs into the super villain Doc Ock. Dr. Octavious tells Peter about his fiancée, a literature student, when they met in college and how she attempted to learn science for his sake and how he tried to learn literature for hers. She was more successful and he less, as he explains to Peter, “She was studying T.S. Eliot, and, compared to science, Eliot is very complicated” (Murphy). A similar perplexity (or prejudice, for that matter) dovetails literary scholarship on Eliot, more specifically in relation to The Waste Land. This paper is not an attempt to make things easier or to determine a synoptically coherent logic behind The Waste Land. Such an attempt would be partially successful, but the main emphasis of this paper is to determine and argue for some markers or critical approaches that dissect the structural anatomy of the poem.
The chief motive for such an attempt is to discover critical approaches that can be applied to the whole poem to garner different readings of the poem. Eliot’s efforts in the poem have laid much of the emphasis on the act of reading, and rather than the complexities of the poem that conjure to ebb reader interest (as immediate reviews of the poem suggested), I argue that the poem, in its fragmented self, is able to take the reader deeper into the poetic experience. The first approach is rather theoretical, based chiefly on the idea of historical sense that Eliot emphasised in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. The second approach is primarily structural, based on the idea of deriving meaning between the experiences of writing and reading. Outlaying these approaches, it is worth mentioning that there have been numerous instances in the research where these approaches have overlapped, with positive results that have eased the analysis.
In the movie Spiderman 2 (2004), Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, gets in to a conversation with Dr. Otto Octavious, the scientist, who later morphs into the super villain Doc Ock. Dr. Octavious tells Peter about his fiancée, a literature student, when they met in college and how she attempted to learn science for his sake and how he tried to learn literature for hers. She was more successful and he less, as he explains to Peter, “She was studying T.S. Eliot, and, compared to science, Eliot is very complicated” (Murphy). A similar perplexity (or prejudice, for that matter) dovetails literary scholarship on Eliot, more specifically in relation to The Waste Land. This paper is not an attempt to make things easier or to determine a synoptically coherent logic behind The Waste Land. Such an attempt would be partially successful, but the main emphasis of this paper is to determine and argue for some markers or critical approaches that dissect the structural anatomy of the poem.
The chief motive for such an attempt is to discover critical approaches that can be applied to the whole poem to garner different readings of the poem. Eliot’s efforts in the poem have laid much of the emphasis on the act of reading, and rather than the complexities of the poem that conjure to ebb reader interest (as immediate reviews of the poem suggested), I argue that the poem, in its fragmented self, is able to take the reader deeper into the poetic experience. The first approach is rather theoretical, based chiefly on the idea of historical sense that Eliot emphasised in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. The second approach is primarily structural, based on the idea of deriving meaning between the experiences of writing and reading. Outlaying these approaches, it is worth mentioning that there have been numerous instances in the research where these approaches have overlapped, with positive results that have eased the analysis.