ENGLISH 45C Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Triptych, World War I, System On A Chip
Document Summary
Recap of last time: fragmented allusions are kind of the point. Eliot wants to imagine west-eur lit tradition, a mode of cultural wholeness; but around him he only sees cultural breakdown. Allusions exist in double space - if culture was unified the way he wants it to be, allusions wouldn"t be so difficult. Part of the difficulty is that eliot can"t quite put allusions together, heap of broken imgs - a mosaic of fragments. Reader has desire to simplify/reduce poem (eliot licenses us to do this in one of his notes: so all the women are one women - characters fold into ea/ other) But poem doesn"t let us fully solve it in that way; just as there"s overlap, there"s disparity. Clearly took a great deal from golden bow and ritual to romance. Underlying series of episodes is series of broken/failed rituals; ritual elems crucial to premodern life are gone.
