Tag: TS Eliot
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Structuralism and the ‘New Perspective’ on Literature
As a feminist looking at texts through structuralist eyes, I am also able to hone in on sex-inflected signifiers pointing to specific patriarchal cultural values I am keen to eliminate.
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The Impact of World War I on Modernist Writers
It seems that this knowledge has prevented Clarissa from also committing suicide although why she would want to do so – so privileged she was such – is not completely clear. If, as she believed, her life was a failure then more had to be at root of such failure than the fact that she…
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The Cultural Construction of ‘Woman’ throughout history in Western Art & Literature
For example, in her essay Poses and Passions, Zirka Filipczak reminds us that the poses adopted by men and women in the artwork of the English Renaissance are strategically quite different – whilst men are represented as active (holding a sword, perhaps) and intelligent (hands on a stack of books, for example), women either sit…
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The Significance of Humoural Theory in Early Modern Drama
In his essay Hamlet and His Problems, TS Eliot (81-87) concludes that such refusal leaves Hamlet ‘dominated by an emotion’ which ‘is inexpressible’ – he can neither ‘understand’ nor ‘objectify’ it – and if a key character such as Hamlet remains inexpressible on stage, then as Eliot suggests the play is an ‘artistic failure’.
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The Role & Representation of the City in Modernist Literature
The implication is that if human character has changed (and according to Woolf at the end of the day all literature is about character) then literature must change as well. What better backdrop than the city to illustrate these changes!
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TS Eliot and the Struggle for Maintenance of a Living Language
If the ‘living language’ is neither about living, nor about how the folks in the street communicate, nor about taking a innovative approach to poetry, then about what can it be?
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Use of Fragmentation in the modernist work of Forster, Eliot, and Woolf
Most certainly as each different section of The Wasteland shifts to the next without transition (or sometimes without even obvious links), we get a sense of how frustrated and lost that society must have felt when all around them they got the same message. But unlike Howards End, The Wasteland seems to suggest connections cannot…
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New Criticism – its usefulness & drawbacks
However there is also significant room to argue as does Willingham, that New Criticism is intellectually naïve in the sense that for although we can never know for certain how the greater context in which it was written influences the text, we can be certain that it has indeed influenced it and if we ignore…
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Representations of Gender in Modernist Literature – Virginia Woolf & TS Eliot
Tracy Hargreaves (Androgyny in Modern Literature) has suggested that for a broad range of writers, the androgyne has signalled both cultural regeneration and degeneration – a disruption in ‘normative’ gendered identities which can be seen as being ‘divine or reviled’. But whilst Woolf takes the position that such disruption would be divine, Eliot seems to…