T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect Satire on Modern Misunderstandings

by Atkins, G. Douglas

• ISBN13: 9781137375742
• ISBN10: 1137375744
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-08-29
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot

Summary

This stimulating and provocative book focuses on the failure to connect that T.S. Eliot saw setting in during the seventeenth century. With special attention to The Waste Land and 'Gerontion,' G. Douglas Atkins shows that Eliot roundly satirized modern misunderstandings and urges readers to make the connections that the "wastelanders" fail to make. Thus, a new approach to reading Eliot opens up, based on suggestions he himself made in the prose and enacted in the poetry.

Author Biography

G. Douglas Atkins is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Reading T.S. Eliot: 'Four Quartets' and the Journey Towards Understanding; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; On the Familiar Essay; Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White; and Swift's Satires on Modernism. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies; has received several awards for teaching; and was the winner of the Kenyon Review's prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose.

Table of Contents

1. The Vanity of Human Wishes
2. Two and two, necessarye coniunction:Towards 'Amalgamating Disparate Experience'
3. He Do the Police in Different Voices: Eyes, You, and I in 'The Hollow Men'
4. 'The End of All Our Exploring': The Gift Half Understood in Four Quartets
5. Voices Hollow and Plaintive, Unattended and Peregrine: Hints and Guesses in The Waste Land
6. Tradition as (Disembodied) Voice: 'The word within the word' in 'Gerontion'
7. From Hints and Guesses: Eliot 'B.C.' and After Conversion