So, here we are. I hope you are all healthy, securely housed, and making the best of a very bad situation. We have to carry on.
For this week, let’s do a motif hunt in Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” What is a motif hunt? I explain the basics in the first annotation on our new “Waste Land” page. Below, you’ll find a recap:
First, listen to this recording – – better if you listen to it on the “Waste Land” page so that you can see the epigraph that I’m talking about:
In the little recording, I use the epigraph to point to a bunch of motifs in “The Waste Land.” These include:
* voices
* text as plagiarism/remix
* zombies (neither this nor that; both this and that;mixing)
* un/natural time
* desire frustrated
* exile
* fragments
* dry/wet (not in the epigraph but related to fragments and the un/natural)
* women and men
Your mission, should you accept it:
- choose an excerpt (five to ten lines) from at least two of the four remaining sections of the poem (“A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” “What the Thunder Said”), i.e. you can choose which of the four sections you want to work with, but you must choose an excerpt from two different sections of the poem;
- use hypothesis to digitally annotate each of your two selected sections and use your digital annotations to show me how many of the motifs from the list above you can find in each of your two excerpts (super bonus points for those who can find the most motifs in any particular excerpt);
- in each of your annotations – – explain how the motif appears, how it differs from one excerpt to the next, and speculate on the significance of the motif
The final version of your motif hunt will be due on Thursday, April 2, at 5 p.m.
Questions? Email me.