Let’s try to get several things done by the time we meet on Tuesday:
Start Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection – – In Our Time. (You can view/download a pdf of the collection here. I can also distribute a version of the book for Kindle or Apple Books apps. Let me know if you prefer this: profhanley@gmail.com) For Tuesday, try reading up to the end of “The Battler.”
We’ll continue discussing Eliot’s “Waste Land” on Tuesday. Between now (Thursday) and Tuesday, let’s get ready to produce our super-annotated version of the poem. What does this mean?
Our goal is to “bring” the “Waste Land” and its bristling allusions into the 21st century. More broadly: how can we create a more contemporary context for Eliot’s poem? Another way of thinking about this is: how can we make the poem richer and more accessible for contemporary readers?
Our method for doing this is to provide as many and as rich annotations as we can. These should be images, videos, audio, and any other (hyperlinked) written texts. A good annotation for this purpose should not just illustrate an image or line from “The Waste Land.” Instead, a good annotation should expand on or comment on the meaning of an image or line or lines from the poem.
For instance, if I were looking for a super-rich annotation for the line “April is the cruellest month,” I might annotate it with Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer.” Both the line and the song speak to a radical disjunction between nature and humanity – – a big motif in Eliot’s poem and a critical issue for us today.
Here’s how we’ll start our project:
- For now, let’s super-annotate just the first section of Eliot’s poem – – “Burial of the Dead.”
- For Tuesday, think about, retrieve, and add at least four good contemporary (post-1960) texts (visual, audio, image, written) to the new version of “The Waste Land” that I’ve created. When you add each annotation, briefly explain in the annotation box why you’ve chosen this piece to add to the poem.
- As you re-read “Burial of the Dead” and think about how you want to annotate it, remember some of the motifs we talked about in class last Tuesday: zombies, dryness/wetness, polyvocality/heteroglossia, fragments, the story of the “Fall,” nature, etc.
- Remember, your annotations should not just illustrate. Instead, think about what Eliot seems to be trying to say in his poem (through this particular line/motif) and how your annotation text develops or adds to or contests the meaning of this line/motif.
This is an opportunity, in some ways, to re-make the poem so that it speaks to your contemporary realities/experience. Think of it as a kind of creative re-writing of Eliot’s “Waste Land.”