Voices Of Plurality And Subversion

The poem The Waste Land is the masterpiece of T.S Eliot, which totally breaks up with the previous literary trend. This paper aims to analyze Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land by applying Bakhtin's polyphony theory, which is one of the most important theories in Baktin's theory system. It is discovered that there exist polyphonic features in almost every part of The Waste Land . For instance, there are oracular voices and individual voices; past,present and future voices, character's voices and the poet's voices in"The Burial of the Dead"; there are mythic voices and realistic voice, feminine voices and masculine voices and inviolable voices and profaned voice in"A Game of Chess"; there are serious and ironical voices, aged voices and youthful voices ,the Buddhism and Christianity voices in"The Fire Sermon"; and there are social voice and religion voice and the polyphony of the thunder's word"DA"in"What the Thunder Said".By analyzing The Waste Land from Bakhin's polyphonic theory, the hidden voices between the lines are released from the dominate power, each voice is equal and is free to express their own viewpoint which adds to the democratic feature of The Waste Land. The plural voices own the subversive power, which aims to rebuild the restless and futile society. The voices of common people from every social status are heard; therefore the subversive plural voices are with the purpose of fighting against the disabled official voices.This thesis is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 briefly introduces the life of T.S Eliot together with his most influential work The Waste Land and the social background information of The Waste Land. Chapter 2 is a summary of the critical reviews both from western critical circle and from Chinese scholars who have done industrial study of The Waste Land. Chapter3 is the theoretical framework, which is a general introduction to Bakhtin and the polyphonic theory. Chapter4 is the main part of the thesis. It discusses the polyphonic feature of The Waste Land in each episode and the social value of The Waste Land in Chapter5. Finally, Chapter 6 is a conclusion that the voices of plurality own the subversive power, which is useful for us to realize the democratic social ideality and to restore the glory of human civilization.