Modernism & Post-Modernism

1. Modernism & Post-Modernism

2. The Waste Land • 434 Lines • Published in 1922 • Considered one of, if not the, most important poem of the 20th century. • Edited by Ezra Pound, leading poet of the Modern Period.

3. The Waste Land • The five parts of The Waste Land are titled: • The Burial of the Dead • A Game of Chess • The Fire Sermon • Death by Water • What the Thunder Said

4. Opening • Like “Prufrock,” the poem is preceded by a Latin and Greek epigraph. It reads: “I saw with my own eyes the Sybyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? She replied, I want to die.” • There is also a dedication to Ezra Pound before the poem begins; it is an Italian quote from Dante that praises him as the “better craftsman.” • The poem is followed by several pages of notes explaining his references, metaphors, and allusions. Both Pound & Eliot wrote poetry that was difficult for average readers to access.

5. Allusions • Quotations from or allusions a vast array of sources, including: • Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, Wagner, Ovid, St. Augustine, Buddhist sermons, folk songs, anthropologists Jessie Weston and James Frazer, etc. abound .It is no wonder why explanatory notes were needed to accompany the poem.

6. Premise • The poem depicts society in a time of cultural and spiritual crisis. • Images of fragmentation are juxtaposed with references to a more stable heritage. • Eliot uses multiple languages in his poem. • References to the Fisher King and the Holy Grail pervade the poem; the implication is that our “modern wasteland” may be redeemed if we learn to ask the right questions.

7. The Fisher King • “TheFisher King, or the Wounded King, figures in Arthurian legend as the latest in a line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Versions of his story vary widely, but he is always wounded in the legs or groin, and incapable of moving on his own. When he is injured, his kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren Wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle Corbenic. Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. ”

8. Juxtapositions • Examples: • An ancient prophet to a contemporary charlatan. • The love of Antony & Cleopatra with a real estate agent’s clerk who mechanically seduces a bored typist at the end of her workday. • Buddhist sermons to a sterile world of rock and dust where “one can neither stand nor lie nor sit.”

9. Technical Innovation • Deliberate FRAGMENTATION & DISCONTINUITY. • Lack of transitional passages. • It is an attack on conventional writing. • Contains unexplained & obscure literary references, sudden shifts in scene or perspective, foreign language, and mixes “lofty” diction and slang. • This all serves to highlight a picture of cultural disintegration, experiment with the Symbolist power of language (the diction, not the narrative, carries the meaning), and exemplifies the modernist self-reflexive or self-conscious style.

10. Eliot’s Impact • The overriding theme of Eliot’s works is “man’s search for meaning.” • His works create a lasting picture of the “barrenness of modern culture and of the search for alternatives.” • He provides an expression of the dilemmas facing a modern people who are both anxious and vulnerable.

11. Poem • I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD • APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  • Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering • Earth in forgetful snow, feeding  • A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; • we stopped in the colonnade,  • And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, • And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keineRussin, stamm’ ausLitauen, echtdeutsch. • And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,  • And I was frightened. He said, Marie, • Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

12. Poem • What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  20You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock,  25(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

13. Poem • This part of the poem goes on to include many allusions to Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil and Dante’s Inferno. • Part II of the poem, A Game of Chess, juxtaposes two scenes of modern sterility: an initial setting of wealthy boredom, neurosis, and lack of communication, and a pub scene in which similar concerns of appearance, sexual attraction, and thwarted childbirth are brought out more visibly and in more vulgar language.

14. From “A Game of Chess” • “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.”  I think we are in rats’ alley 115Where the dead men lost their bones.  “What is that noise?”                       The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”                       Nothing again nothing. 120                                              “Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”         I remember                 Those are pearls that were his eyes. 125“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

15. Ending •   I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? 425 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down  Poi s’ascosenelfocochegliaffinaQuandofiamceuchelidon—O swallow swallowLe Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins 430Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.        Shantihshantihshantih

16. Ending • Shantihshantihshantih • From Sanskrit, means “peace, calmness, tranquility.” • Eliot translated it as “ the peace which passeth understanding.”

17. Audio– Eliot’s Reading • http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_harp_ITH.html

18. Chart– Modernism vs. Post-Modernism • http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/pomo.html • Modern Art: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr0Vjnsa-WY • Post Modern Art: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs0zzsHiVWc • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL462BW97qE