What to do with "The Waste Land"....

Folks!

Here are some bits and pieces regarding "The Waste Land". First of all, some questions to consider as you prep for next week:

• What are these “fragments” (ln 431) shoring the speaker up against? What is this “ruin” of which the speaker speaks? How is this “shoring up” process working, and what does this tell us about art/modernity/etc? (is it important, too, that most of these fragments come from literary pasts and/or contemporary humdrum nonsense?)

• What kinds of violence go on in this poem? If we think of the violence that occurs in many of our pieces of lit for the semester as about confrontations between “others,” what kinds of confrontations go on here? How do we account for the LACK of confrontation? In what way could this LACK be a kind of violence in and of itself?

• What’s the point of writing a poem that’s so hard for people to read? Does its style do a kind of violence to our typical modes of readerly reception? If so, why? What’s Eliot’s point in this?

•  Is this a poem of many voices? Or one voice? Come up with some arguments/evidence for both!

• Looking at the Cope: what does she help you to see about Eliot’s poem? What aspects does she mock? Emphasize? Why?

Also, just for your interest:

A fascinating reworking of Eliot into comic book form/ noir and hardboiled detective fiction.

A even more fascinating Genesis song that reworks "The Fire Sermon" into modern parlance/prog rock.

Hope this helps and/or entertains.

Dr. Renzi