Courses:

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Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. (Download a version from eBooks@Adelaide)

Ellman, Richard, ed. Modern Poems. 2nd ed. Edited by Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair, and O'Clair Ellmann, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. ISBN: 0393959074.

Note

T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (download a version from Project Gutenberg) is arguably the most influential poem of the period. Like many other groundbreaking works it tends to teach its readers how to read it. It is not only a poem of refraction; its method is "mythic" and refractive. Its components both depend on allusion and remake the frame or implications of the allusion, restructuring the literary history on which it depends. In some senses, this 'historical' argument about historicity is both the technique of the sequence AND the 'point' of the poem itself: questions for instance of how and whether we can learn anything from history, or whether some problematic cultural attitudes (anti-Semitism) are so threaded through our culture that we need to 'redeem' that history, or to 'purify' its language. Some read "TWL" as historically specific, a choral representation of its contemporary social and sexual mores; others read "TWL" as a more general meditation on the nature of historical progress and decline. The poem teaches its own historical method, and we learn that method cumulatively. The poem is more fun to read slowly, voice by voice and section by section. If we read it aggregatively, we can judge more accurately whether these people are in fact communicating with one another, what are the relations between sections and themes, and why the poem needs a 'narrator' ('Tiresias') who has been both male and female, and who is several thousand years old. Instead of doing that work all in one or two classes, I propose we spend 10-15 minutes in each class meeting for several months, to read section-by-section closely. I list those readings as 'sequence-poem.'

Readings by Class Session

The pages referenced in the table below refer to texts from Modern Poems.