week 16 ts eliot 英国文学导论.ppt

Thomas Stearns Eliot,(1888-1965),American-born English poet,playwright,and literary critic arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century,a major innovator in modern English poetrya leader of the modernist movementfamous above all for his revolutionary poem The Waste Land(1922),Thomas Stearns Eliot,The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948“for his outstanding,pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”,T.S.Eliot receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,December 1948.,“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”-T.S.Eliot.,I.Biography,Born in USA of a bourgeois family originally from New England,who had moved to St.Louis,Missouri and lived there during the first 18 years of his life.,T.S.Eliot(1938)by Wyndham Lewis,He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyama translation of the poetry of Omar KhayyamHe said the results were gloomy and despairing,and he destroyed them.,Education,Smith Academy in Saint Louis,US(1898 to 1905)studied Latin,Ancient Greek,French,and German.Milton Academy in Mass.,US for a preparatory year Harvard University,a B.A.and M.A.in philosophy(1906 to 1909)the Sorbonne in Paris,France 1910-1911,studied philosophyOxford University,UK,Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College,Oxford in 1914Eliot did not settle at Merton,and left after a year.,He wrote:“I hate university towns and university people,who are the same everywhere,with pregnant wives,sprawling children,many books and hideous pictures on the walls.Oxford is very pretty,but I dont like to be dead.,In a letter in December 1914,Eliot,aged 26,wrote,“I am very dependent upon women.”Less than 4 months later,Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood,a Cambridge governess.They were married at Hampstead Register Office in June,1915,The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat.Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair,but the allegations were never confirmed.,worked first as a teacherthen worked as a clerk for Lloyds Bankwrote poetry in his spare time,It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of Ezra Pound,who recognized his poetic genius at onceassisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines,most notably“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”in Poetry in 1915.,Prufrock and Other Observations 普鲁弗洛克及其他his first book of poemspublished in 1917immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde,Eliots reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportionswith the publication of The Waste Land in 1922now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the 20th century,Eliot renounced his citizenship to the United States and said:“My mind may be American but my heart is British.”In 1927,Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism and became a British citizen,He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic,proclaiming himself“classicist in literature,royalist in politics,and anglo-catholic in religion.”,In 1932,Eliot left Vivienne in England and went back to Harvard.Upon his return,he arranged for a formal separation from her.Vivienne was committed to a mental hospital in 1938,and remained there until she died.Although Eliot was still legally her husband,he never visited her.,In 1957,TS Eliot married Esm Valerie Fletcher,who was 32.,II.Aesthetic views,1.A poem should be an organic thing in itself.Once it is finished,the poet will no longer have control of it.It should be judged,analyzed by itself without the interference of the poets personal influence.,2.Modern life is chaotic,futile,fragmentary,so poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of lifethis kind nature of life should be projected,not analyzed,3.The poet should draw upon tradition:use the past to serve the resent and futureborrow from authors remote in time,alien in language,diverse in interestuse the past to underscore what is missing from the present,III.Techniques,Use of 1.disconnected images/symbols2.literary allusions/references3.highly expressive meter and rhythm of free verses4.metaphysical whimsical images/whims5.flexible tone,IV.Poetry,The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,阿尔弗雷德普鲁弗洛克的情歌,1915The Waste Land,荒原,1922The Hollow Men,空心人,1925Ash Wednesday,圣灰星期三,1930Four Quartets,四个四重奏,1944,His belief:poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry.,In rejecting the poetic values of the English romantics and Victorians,Eliot,along with William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound,set new poetic standards equal to those established by James Joyce and Marcel Proust in fiction.,The Waste Land Contents,1.Assessment2.Synopsis:Five sections3.Two allusions4.Theme5.Language&Form6.Symbolic meaning of“waste land”,1.Assessment,The Waste Land,Eliots most important single poem,has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry,comparable to Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads.,expressed his horror at the spiritual turmoil of modern Europe.,On one level it describes cultural and spiritual crisis,reflected in its use of fragmentation and discontinuity.,“NAMsibyllam quidem Cuimis eg ipse oculismeis vidi in ampulla pendere，et cum illi pueri dicerent:;repondebat illa:.”For Ezra Poundil miglior fabbro.,“是的，我自己亲眼看见古米的西比尔吊在一个笼子里。孩子们在问她：西比尔，你要什么，她回答说：我要死。”献给埃兹拉庞德最卓越的匠人,The poem is 433 lines long and is divided into 5 sections,which are not logically constructed or connected.,2.Synopsis:Five sections,Section I.The Burial of the Dead（葬礼）Section II.A Game of Chess（对弈）Section III.The Fire Sermon（火诫）Section IV.Death by Water（水里的死亡）Section V.What the Thunder Said（雷的说话）,Section I:“The Burial of the Dead,deals chiefly with the theme of death in life The inhabitants in the modern Waste Land,who have lost the knowledge of good and evil,live a sterilelsterail,meaningless life.,In the last passage of the section,Eliot connects the“unreal city”with the city of the deadmodern London with Dantes Hellclaimed that those who have no faith of religion are actually living dead.To bury the dead is to bury a memory,which brings no hope of growth or renewal.,The first section,as the section title indicates,is about death.The section begins with the words“April is the cruellest month,”which is perhaps one of the most remarked upon and most important references in the poem.,Those familiar with Chaucers poem The Canterbury Tales will recognize that Eliot is taking Chaucers introductory line from the prologuewhich is optimistic about the month of April and the regenerative,life-giving season of springand turning it on its head.,Just as Chaucers line sets the tone for The Canterbury Tales,Eliots dark words inform the reader that this is going to be a dark poem.Throughout the rest of the first section,as he will do with the other four sections,Eliot shifts among several disconnected thoughts,speeches,and images.,Collectively,the episodic scenes in lines 1 through 18 discuss the natural cycle of death,which is symbolized by the passing of the seasons.The first seven lines employ images of spring,such as“breeding/Lilacs,”and“Dull roots with spring rain.”,In line 8,Eliot tells the reader“Summer surprised us,coming over the Starnbergersee.”The time has shifted from spring to summer.,And while the reference to Starnbergerseea lake south of Munich,Germanyhas been linked to various aspects of Eliots past,to Eliots readers at the time the poem was published,it would have stuck out for other reasons,given that World War I had fairly recently ended.,Section II:“A Game of Chess”,giving a rather concrete illustration of the sterile situationA picture of spiritual emptiness is presented with the reproduction of a contemporary pub conversation between two cockney women.The discussion is constantly interrupted by the pub keepers“Hurry up please its time.”,Section III,“The Fire Sermon,”,expresses a painfully elegiac feeling by juxtaposing the vulgarity and shallowness of the modern with the beauty and simplicity of the past.,What was once ritualistic meaningful is now despairing empty,section IV,“Death by Water”,the drowned Phoenician(腓尼基人)Sailor is an emblem(象征)of futile(无意义的)worries over profit and loss,youth and age.,With the curative and baptismal power of the water images,the drowned Phoenician Sailor also recalls the rebirth of the drowned god of the fertility cults,thus giving an instance of the conquest of death.,Section V,“What the Thunder Said”,The title appears to be derived from an Indian myth,in which the supreme Lord of the Creation speaks through the thunder.,3.Two allusions,a.the Holy Grail The quest for it makes up an important segment of the Arthurian cycleb.the Fisher King The tale involves a king who is lame in one leg(a euphemism for impotency)which in turn causes the land to become barren(infertile).,a.the Holy Grail,Eliot alludes to various ancient religions as well as to the Holy Grail,finding in them the common thread of the mythic cycle of the death and resurrection of gods.,a medieval legend the dish,plate,or cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper,said to possess miraculous powers,Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesussends it with his followers to Great Britain uses the Grail to catch Christs blood while interring(埋葬)him a line of guardians to keep it safe in Britain,b.the Fisher King,he found in a book by Jessie Weston,From Ritual to Romancea mythic figure whose loss of power or fertility produces a corresponding blight(枯萎,凋零)or drought in his kingdom,the land be restored to fertility only through:the death of this kinghis replacement by a new,young,and vigorous knight,Meditation on the state of Western civilization,especially regarding the sense of depressionwastefutility of the post-World War I era,4.Theme,(1)presents physical disorder and spiritual decadence in the modern western society(2)reflects disillusion and despair of a whole post war generation,anguish,menace,sterility had been afflicting all sensitive members of the postwar generation,(3)concerns with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning(4)reflects the 20th century peoples disillusion and frustration in a meaningless and boring world,5.Language&Form,modernist poetryirregular verse,at times free,at times reminiscent of the blank verse of Eliots playsEnglish original with passages in other languages,a series of fragmentary dramatic monologuesa dense chorus of voices and culture historical quotations,that fade one into another,At Ezra Pounds suggestion,the poem was reduced to half the length of earlier drafts(the poem bears a dedication acknowledging Pound as il miglior fabbro,“the better craftsman”),complex scholarly annotations:Special credit is given to the work of the anthropologist James Frazer,The Golden BoughJessie Westons treatment of the Grail legends,From Ritual to Romance,6.Symbolic meaning of“waste land”,The“waste land”in the poem as 1.modern culture having drifted away from its spiritual roots2.trope(比喻)of destructive repetition controlling human history3.loss of touch with cycles of life and nature,4.images of desolationsterilitydrynesswaste5.image of a society that feeds upon itself and also lies mired in its own waste.,social significance,The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning,significance and purpose.,The poem has developed a whole set of historical,cultural and religious themes.It is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century peoples disillusionment and frustration in a sterile(贫瘠的）and futile(无用的)society.,3.The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,started in 1910published in Chicago in 1915the poem that made his nameregarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement,LET us go then,you and I,When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised(被麻醉)upon a table;,1.Explanation of the Title,original title of this poem:“Prufrock Among the Women”.Eliot took the last name of the title character from a sign advertising the William Prufrock furniture company,a business in Eliots hometown.,A dramatic monologue presents a moment in which a narrator/speaker discusses a topic in so doing,reveals his personal feelings to a listener,During his discourse,the speaker intentionally and unintentionally reveals information about himself.The main focus of a dramatic monologue is this personal information,not the speakers topic.A dramatic monologue is a type of character study.,The Speaker/Narrator,a balding,insecure middle-aged man,who expresses his thoughts about the dull,uneventful,mediocre life he leads as a result of his feelings of inadequacy his fear of making decisions,Unable to seize opportunities or take risks(especially with women),he lives in a world that is the same today as it was yesterday and will be the same tomorrow as it is today.He does try to make progress,but his timidity and fear of failure inhibit him from taking action.,Setting,The action takes place in the evening in a bleak section of a smoky city.probably St.Louis,London,or any city anywhere,Characters,(1)J.Alfred Prufrock(2)The Listener(3)The Women(4)The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves,(1)J.Alfred Prufrock,the speaker/narratora timid,overcautious middle-aged manneurotic（神经质的）self-important,illogical incapable of action an interesting tragic figure,He escorts his silent listener through streets in a shabby part of a city,past cheap hotels and restaurants,to a social gathering where women he would like to meet are conversing.However,he is hesitant to take part in the activity for fear of making a fool of himself.,a man caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desiredare not to seek love because even if he could find it,it would not satisfy his needs,He compares himself with Hamlet.As a result of his timidity he has become incapable of action of any sort.,(2)The Listener,An unidentified companion of Prufrock.The listener could also be Prufrocks inner self,one that prods him but fails to move him to action.,(3)The Women,Women at a social gathering.Prufrock would like to meet one of them but worries that she will look down on him.,(4)The Lonely Men in Shirtsleeves,Leaning out of their windows,they smoke pipes.They are like Prufrock in that they look upon a scene but do not become part of it.,The smoke from their pipes helps form the haze over the city,the haze that serves as a metaphor for a timid catwhich is Prufrock.,Themes,a.Loneliness and Alienationb.Indecisionc.Inadequacyd.Pessimism,a.Loneliness and Alienation,Prufrock is a pathetic man whose anxieties and obsessions have isolated him.an ironic contrast between a pretended“love song”and a confession of the speakers incapability of facing up to love and to life in a sterile upper-class world,b.Indecision,Prufrock resists making decisions for fear that their outcomes