Module B: Critical Study

T.S Eliot

* Textual integrity *
- The unity of a text; its coherent use of form and language to produce an integrated
whole in terms of meaning and value.’ Textual integrity is achieved when all components
of the text combine to form a cohesive whole.

Other poems to read:

- Wasteland
- Ash wednesday
- Portrait of a lady

Modernism:
- Involves human experiment
- Challenge trends of the time

T.S Eliot’s writing:

- Modernised his writing style by himself in isolation
- Isolation of characters
- Responds to modern anxieties and views
- Central cataclysm
- a large-scale and violent event in the natural world
- Changing world view
- Eliot converts to anglican
- Leads to the abandonment of his avant garde style

LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK:

- Incongruity
- not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings or other aspects of something.
- Common use of urban landscape
- Reference to pilgrim which it anti modern
- Consistent rhythm → 4 beats per line - tetrameter
- Subverts generic expectations / conventions
- Contradicts his first lines → let us go - etherized
- Imperative -asking someone to do something
- No obvious narrative
- No further reference to ‘you’
- Use of modern / scientific language - etherized
- Time of day - abstraction - how can the evening be spread out
- Michelangelo → renaissance artist
- Suggests superficial talk of women of the time - endless conversation
 - No sense of intelligent discussion
- Matches his anxieties of women
- One night stands - not approved by society - illicit sexuality
- Fugitive & improper - conventions of drawing rooms
- Brings the 2 worlds together
- His representation of women & relationships tells us about his identity / character
- Can’t engage with people as a whole
- Sees them as singular limbs
- Half deserted → people are participating in life
- People who are also outside strict conventions
- Equally horrified immorality - superficiality
- More particularly of object

Words relating to T.S Eliot:

- Futility - pointlessness or uselessness.
- Indecisiveness
- Isolation
- Existential
- Unfulfilled
- Nihilism - the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is
meaningless.
- Mundane - lacking interest or excitement; dull.
- Fragmented
- Disturbance
- Tradition
- Consumed with own thoughts
- Disillusionment - a feeling of disappointment resulting from the discovery that something
is not as good as one believed it to be.
- Incapable of relationship
- Harrowing - acutely distressing.
- Meaninglessness
- Spiritual
- Banality - so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring
- Pointlessness
- Modernity
- Turbulence
- Insignificance
- Personal doubt and despair

Ideas represented by Eliot:

- Fragmentation of the representation of body images
- Lack of romantic connections and intimacy
- Sleazy, dirty, gritty imagery of actions
- Constant allusions / references to hell
- Use of animals to represent setting
- Biblical allusions more present in later poems
- Use of time as a symbol of progression
- Existential angst and constant questioning
- Use of liminal space to show transformation - threshold
- Fear of progression
- Broken representation of society
- Temporal stability / instability
- Night brings the loss of clarity
- Anchoring images to set time in place
- Turmoil between internal and external
- Inserting twisted things into the normalities of the world
- Bleak outlook isolated d/ alienated individual / persona
- Objective collerative
- Measurement of time through objects
- Absolute and reassuring values
- Pessimism, dissolution futility
- Individuality - find himself in others - we find comfort
- Constant