western lit

8/13/2019 Western Lit

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Luarca 1

Miguel V. Luarca

Mr. Vince Serrano

Lit 126.2

15 January 2013

Annotated Bibliography

Appel, Markus, and Barbara Malekar. "The Influence of Paratext on Narrative Persuasion:

Fact, Fiction, or Fake?" Human Communication Research 4.38 (2012): 459-84. Print.

From the point of view of cognitive psychology, Appel and Malekar investigate

the effect of the paratext in terms of narrative reliability. In theory, all modes ofinformation we receive come in the form of narratives. Paratextual appendages in the

narrativity of communication lend credibility and persuasiveness to the information

delivered.

In connection with Dworkins assertions , and a close reading of how Eliots notes

operate throughout the poem, is it possible to read El iots paratext as a means of

supporting , that is, lending persuasiveness , to The Waste Land in light of his own

critical and literary project as laid out in his critical essay Tradition and the Individual

Talent ? Also, cognitive psychology studies the paratext as a self-sufficient medium of

communication; a notion that mirrors the paratextual experimentations by postmodern

authors as recorded in Dworkins critical essay Textual Prostheses . Therefore, one can

assert that Eliots use of paratext initiates discourse with regard to how these notes can

operate independently as clear claims to literary historicity (that is, to the tradition Eliot

discusses in his essay), and at the same time is a separate but dependent and integral part

of the poem that serves a s a means of lending it persuasiveness. By extension, it may


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even function as an element of Eliots poetics that satisfy a mediums need (the medium,

in this case, being imaginative literature, specifically the postmodern poem) for proof of

reliability and persuasiveness, usually afforded by utilizing paratext.

Boukalova, Lucie. "The Unquiet Boundary, or the Footnote Auto-exegetic Modes in

(neo-)modernist Poetry." GRAAT Anglophone Studies . GRAAT, Aug. 2010. Web. 15 Jan.

2013. .

This paper directly scrutinizes Eliots use of the notes against the backdrop of

canonicity, by interpreting the notes as a practice that incorporates centuries of cultural

acknowledgment and an awareness of literary heritage and precedence (4). The paperasserts that Eliot was self-canonizing his poetry through his myriad references to older

poets and writers, such as St. Augustine and Spenser, and even acknowledges

companionship with contemporary writers such as Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest

Radford. But Boukalova recalls also Eliots reported change of opinion regarding the

efficacy and need of paratextual auto -exegetic modes, especially in light of how latter

poets employ these same apparatuses (David Jones in his Anathemata (1952), and Basil

Bunting in his Briggflatts (1966)). Ultimately, Boukalova apprehends the notes as

consistent with Eliots call of difficulty in his essay The Metaphysical Poets (1921).

Cruz, Conchitina. "T.S. Eliot's Notes and the Figure of the Reader in "The Wasteland"" High

Chair . N.p., June 2005. Web. 15 Jan. 2013.

.

Cruz focuses on the difficulties encountered by the Reader in assimilating the

information given by Eliot in his notes to the overall appreciation and interpretation of

the long poem. She recounts the various strategies employed by earlier critics of The


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Waste Land such as Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, and Michael North among others,

and tracks down even the various rates and frequency of these textual intrusions and what

meaning can be gleaned from these changes (for example, Cruz notices how 6 notes

appear in seventeen lines in the section The Fire Sermon , where the notes serve to

heighten the Readers awareness of his/her predicament, i.e. as a character in the poem) .

Cruz straightforwardly qualifies the notes as a direct address to the Poets imagined

f igure of the Reader, making the Reader him/herself a character in the Poets waste land .

And following this line of thinking, the notes then are supposed to serve as valuable clues

to a credible interpretation of the poem; an internal language, so to speak, familiar to allthat inhabit the waste land of the poem in which the Reader is supposedly a part of by

virtue of the direct address of the notes. But at the same time, the process of signification

supposedly orchestrated by these notes put to question the whole notion of apprehension,

of knowing the meaning of the poem. This curiously powerful suggestion then lends an

almost extra-literary cohesiveness to The Waste Land s heap of broken images, in that

the notes make the Reader complicit to the breaking down of meaning demonstrated by

the poems postmodernity.

Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Print.

Ellmann glosses through the modernist concept of impersonality, the anti-

Romanticist notion that the poet effaces himself in order to lend his work some historical

integrity and objectivity. The book revues how Eliot (and also Pound), adhering to this

poetic disposition as Eliot himself intimates in his essay Tradition and the Individual

Talent , equivocates between impersonality and subjectivity through the looming


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presence, and all-powerful internal logic, of the poets personal emotion which Eliot

permits to stage-manage throughout the poem. In the books intensive analysis of The

Waste Land , Ellmann grounds his reading with the Freudian concept of the uncanny

and its pervasiveness as seen in the consistent repetition of tropes of death and horror,

with a special focus on how the uncanny, or in German, the unheimlich , or unhomely,

renders even the poetic gesture of quotations (or often in Eliots case, deliberate

misquotations) as unfamiliar, in that the affinity for, even kinship with, past texts is

defamiliarized ultimately suggesting a loss of origin. Applying this line of thinking to

an investigation of the function of Eliots endnotes, the historicity purported by themyriad allusions and paratextuality of The Waste Land , then, rehearses an inherent

tension to be found in Eliots brand of modernist i mpersonality. This tension mirrors too

the confusing objectivity and subjectivity of endnotes, as explicated by Dworkin in

Textual Prosthesis .

Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. "Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into Temptation."

Twentieth Century Literature 44.1 (1998): 82-99. Discovery Service for Ateneo De Manila

University-Rizal Library . Web. 15 Jan. 2013.

Kaiser confronts head- on the problematic credibility of Eliots notes, and how The

Waste Land has developed a critical tradition that engrosses itself over them, entrusting

the whole process of interpretation on the unity seemingly implied by the erudition of

these references. Coming from an analysis of Edmund Wilsons review of the poem,

Kaiser s tudies how Wilsons familiarity with Eliots then unpublished notes shaped his

reading of the poem, making an indelible influence for future literary analyses of The

Waste Land . Kaiser sees the notes as enabling the literary critics attempt at solving the


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problems of modernity suggested by the poem, but observes a poststructuralist breaking

down of the integrity of these notes when more contemporary theorists have

demonstrated how these selfsame crises prove to be the very basis of these critics

expertise.

Lennon, Paul. "Ludic Language: The Case of the Punning Echoic Allusion." Brno Studies in

English 37.1 (2011): 79-95. Print.

Lennon analyzes how the allusion operates quite closely to the configuration of

the pun. He begins by defining the echoic allusion as the same as the literary

allusion, meaning the writer acknowledges and introduces to the present text theexistence of another secondary text via use of a cryptic quotation, and this mirroring of

sorts rehearses quite closely the process of punning (in fact, Lennon notes that the

etymology of allusion, the Latin allusio actually meant word - play, and the word

allusion was understood as such during the Renaissance period). Quite scientifically,

Lennon charts out the process of how readers take in an allusion as 1) recognition, 2)

inferencing, and 3) appreciation of the writer as alluder. It also questions the necessity of

alluding, and concludes that allusions attract readers attention upon recognition; it

cannot be a locus of new creation of meaning through the semantics of the present and

absent texts; it also produces humor through instances of incongruity; and lastly,

recognition and interpretation of allusion also incite aesthetic pleasure through

demonstrations of linguistic and liter ary ingenuity. In this light, we can use Lennons

study of the echoic allusion as a litmus test for Eliots many instances of alluding to older

texts does Eliot conform to the given purpose of allusion, or does his brand of allusion

suggest an altogether different agenda?


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Sangi, Muhammad Khan, and Farhan Ebadat Yar Khan. "The Waste Land in the Light of T. S.

Eliot's Concept of Tradition." Language in India 11.12 (2011): 427-41. Print.

Sangi and Khan assert the unity of Eliots poem and the notes appended to it by

explicating how the notes function as Eliots own demonstration of his critical theories

regarding tradition. Eliot defines the poet as one who acknowledges the literary heritage

developed by earlier poets before him, and contributing to the historical narrative

initiated by a perceived unified tradition. Eliots notes, then, substantiate this claim to

membership with tradition.

Smith, Grover. "Memory and Desire: The Waste Land." T.S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays .Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971. 67-98. Print.

Smiths book contains a rguably the most exhaustive study of The Waste Land s

many possible sources and references, and offers an interpretation of the poem in view of

these identified intertexts. This project by Smith takes to heart Eliots attempt at

explanation in his endnotes to The Waste Land , and thus is a very handy elaboration of

Eliots own sparse notes. Interestingly, Smith assumes a cohesive narrative at the h eart of

the postmodernist poem, and attempts to exhume this cohesion from the rubble of Eliots

heap of broken images by extrapolating from a wide array of possible sources, such as

those intimated already in Eliots own endnotes (e.g. Shakespeare, the Bible, the

Upanishads, Dante, etc.) and Smiths own conjectures. Smith speaks in terms of

themes, and quite confidently ties up Eliots disjointed poetics by assertions made

credible by Smiths intensive familiarity with these source texts. As per Dworkin ,

Smiths procedure then incidentally validates the role of the note as proper repository


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for material beyond the writer's personal authority, and bolsters up the notion that

Eliots footnoting corresponds to the poems literary historicity, objectivity, and integrity.

Unger, Leonard. Moments and Patterns . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,

1967. Print.

More of a scholar than a critic, Unger sweeps through the whole Eliotic canon in

order to identify the eponymous patterns that abound throughout Eliots poetry and

plays, drawing both from biographical details of the poet and, more interestingly, from

intertextual references. With regard to The Waste Land , Unger suggests reading the long

poem as an arrangement of fragments, citing th e free-flowing fade-ins and -outs ofnumerous poetic voices and personas all climaxing to inconclusive endings that refuse to

clarify their subject(s), but rather simply terminate themselves. Hinging his whole

analysis on the poems design as a heap of broken images , Unger operates like a puzzle

solver, deducing meaning and interpretation through Eliots tendency to repeat details,

suggesting that Eliot as a poet signifies himself through the intertextuality of all his

poems and plays . This book treats Eliots poetry like hyperlinks leading to one another,

and may account for how Eliot necessitates his footnoting not for purposes of elucidation,

but rather a continuation of his hyperlink style a strange, self-defining dynamic

between the seeming erudition of allusions, quotations, and even direct revelations by the

poet as to the origin of certain lines, and how these explanations pinpoint not to an

external, paratextual guide to signification, but rather to an internal logic that manages to

encompass even the vague, canonical, and antiquated sources mentioned in Eliots

endnotes.

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