T.S.Eliot.pptVIP

T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) I. Waste Land Painters F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner. All painted the post-war western world as a waste land, lifeless, and hopeless. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a picture of modern social crisis, modern civilized society turns into a waste land due to ethnical degradation and disillusionment with dreams. The Hollow Men is no less depressing. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about the frustration and despair from the failure of the American dream. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms portrayed the dilemma of modern man utterly thrown upon himself for survival in an indifferent world, revealing man’s impotence and his despairing courage to assert himself against overwhelming odds. II. New Criticism: a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. Close reading of Diction Poetic/narrative elements 1.insisted on treating the poem as a self-sufficient verbal object; 2. warned against the critical practices that distract the reader from the poem itself; 3. avoided readings that relied upon biographical, psychological or historical context. New criticism’s synonyms= objective criticism, practical criticism, textual criticism, close reading The “text and the text alone” approach III. New Verse  (P173.) IV. His works Poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land (epic) Hollow Man Ash Wednesday Four Quartets Plays Murder in the Cathedral Sweeney Agonistes The Cocktail Party The Confidential Clerk His Critical essays The Sacred Wood Essays on Style and Order Elizabethan Essays The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms After Strange Gods The Wasted Land The Burial of the Dead A Game of Chess The Fire Sermon Death by