Seminar Discussion Overview

Today, with two excellent presentations, we had a rich discussion of 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' - its solipsism, its stream of consciousness, its links to Baudelaire and Dante, its sense of the hellishness of accedia, its representation of fantasy and consciousness. We saw it as a text of mourning - for possibilities lost, roads not taken. When you read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for next week, will you explore the family resemblances between this poem and Woolf's novel. What differences are there? We also read The Waste Land - as a dadaist and as a modernist text, with a sense of the difference between this text and Helen Mirrlees' Paris. We discussed the use of collage, of the texual fragment in The Waste Land and saw it as a formal response to the disruptions and destructions of the First World War. How do we read the micro and the macro level of the text in the wake of, in the light of the First World War. We will begin our seminar by discussing
Woolf;'s brief but incredibly innovative short story 'Kew Gardens' (in my compendium). It is a short story which has moments of focus on the now, images of nowness; it is also a kind of collage in anticipation of The Waste Land. So - Kew Gardens and To the Lighthouse for next week and a continuation of the illuminating discussion we had this morning.