Now that you’re working in groups to track your motif through Eliot’s “Waste Land,” you’ll want to try to accomplish the following as you annotate together:
- Narrow your motif. For instance, if your chosen motif is “wet/dry,” try to focus on one particular instance of this motif – – for instance, rivers, or oceans, or sailors, etc.
- As you annotate, you want to think about the following: what meanings is Eliot giving to the motif within the poem? what kinds of oppositions is the motif invoking – – between life and death, past and present, high and low, etc.? what seems important to Eliot about the motif? how does the motif change from one instance to another? The goal here is to build as rich a meaning for the motif within the poem as you can.
- As you explore the meaning of the motif within the poem, you should also be thinking about how this motif connects to and connects the poem with other texts and contexts. For instance, have you seen this kind of motif in any of the other texts that we’ve studied? How so? Where? How does this motif connect to other cultural events circa 1922 – – music, film, art, popular and high cultures, etc.? How might this motif both allude to and interpret the social contexts of 1922, e.g. the “modern” city, or speed, or technology?
- As your work takes shape, think about some of ways of enriching your annotations: are there good visual images that might make your annotations more interesting and illuminating? are there texts or sites that you might want to link your annotations to? E.g., how can you connect your annotations to the multimedia sources available via the interwebs in ways that make your annotation more interesting and more insightful.
Keep expanding and adding to your annotations. Your goal is to develop as much good material as you can. Later, you can edit and shape this material.