Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form

Details

Ressource 1Download: Scully-PlasticityVioletHour-2018.pdf (1597.54 [Ko])
State: Public
Version: Final published version
License: Not specified
Serval ID
serval:BIB_5B6D4F13A6B5
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Journal
Journal of Modern Literature
Author(s)
Matthew Scully
ISSN
0022-281X
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2018
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
41
Number
3
Pages
166-182
Language
english
Abstract
For Catherine Malabou, plasticity names what gives or receives form, as well as what potentially annihilates form. Malabou does not propose a liberation from the closure of form but a liberation within form itself. In The Waste Land, the metamorphic force of Tiresias, who figures a bodily excess at the approximate center of the poem, announces a disordering impulse from within the poem. Critical approaches to The Waste Land have often reproduced Eliot’s desire for order by repeatedly privileging ordering logics in readings of the poem’s form, especially in readings focused on the role of Tiresias. In contrast, by thinking of Tiresias as a plastic figure and as a figure for the plasticity of The Waste Land, we can reconceive the form of The Waste Land as that which bears witness to the disordering and excessive force excluded and absented from traditional conceptions of the poem’s formal organization.
Keywords
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Form, Catherine Malabou, Plasticity
Create date
21/02/2023 14:56
Last modification date
31/01/2024 8:31
Usage data