| A successful literary work is generally based on certain philosophical and aesthetical principles. T. S. Eliot produces a body of creative masterpieces all his life. As one of the representative works of modernism, The Waste Land brings great impact to western poetry. Its abundance in literal allusions and legends, its modernistic art techniques such as modernistic painting, music technique and perspectives makes The Waste Land a milestone in modernistic poetry. The thesis is intended to explore Eliot's philosophical disposition underlying The Waste Land by resorting to the mythological figure Tiresias from mythological, ironic and structural perspective.The Waste Land is abundant in implication, it includes so much from arduous personal experiences to complicated philosophical views and aesthetics. It depicts the deteriorated worlds in ironic tone while it intends to construct its redeemable mythology. It is dramatic, consists of various isolated settings. Such fragments are the ways to connect the past with the present, to associate religion and mythology with the secular world, to combine art with its current mission. T. S. Eliot claims that poets should reconcile their wisdom and feelings to create a new wholeness. Tiresias, the blind prophet is a "old man with wrinkled female breasts" embodies such commission, attempts to reconcile the physical disorder and spiritual desolation with the harmonious world and meaningful life, but he fails.The thesis is composed of 6 parts.Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to T. S. Eliot's background and his major artistic views .Eliot grew up amid the massive social and political change. After World War I ,manner and morals were looser. Life seemed uprooted and uncertain, and a mood of deep disillusion set in along with a rejection of old certainties and constraints, the world was different, and art changed with it. Eliotseldom writes directly of immediate events , and he tends to explore an inner world of unease and anxiety projected onto contemporary urban landscapes rather than political or social events . The scenes , characters and the moods of Eliot's poems reflect the history of his time, his poetry is "modern" in other important ways that reflect literary and poetic technique . Eliot's classical and philosophical studies provided a rich source of allusion and reference for newly complex and intellectual poetry .In The Waste Land, Eliot extends and develops his artistic views, he applies his literary theory of "historical sense", "organic unity", "impersonal" and "objective correlative".Chapter 2 explores the important factors influencing the creating of The Waste Land, it focuses on certain aspects of early-twentieth-century western civilization which attracted the attention of artists, philosophers, we can see the personal and philosophic foundation of the poem. Artists of the first decades of the 20th century tried to find new ways of seeing , new models of knowing . The rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of 20th-century science and art . The most conspicuous feature of cubist form is the abandonment of single perspective . The proliferation of perspectives obvious in cubism is basic to Eliot's poetry. Eliot juxtaposes slices or fragments of city life , in The Waste Land he presents many broken perspectives on many cities in and out of time , so he adds a dimension in which his work is self-reflexive , a dimension in which incorporate the crises in western culture into the process of reading . Eliot considers that from a perspective within any aggregate of phenomena all objects will seem structured, but as internal points of view change, objects assume a sequence of variant structures.Chapter 3 analyzes the mythical method used in The Waste Land and study Tiresias' function in mythological perspective, Tiresias functions as Eliot's higher viewpoint, Tiresias perceives the contemporary world in the poem from a perspective outside space and time altogethe...
|
PDF Full Text Request