Using the wiki

Some of you have reported that you're having some issues with the wiki. Here's a brief guide to how to use the Eliot wiki. Enjoy!

For Tuesday, October 27

For Tuesday, let's finish up Hemingway's In Our Time.

Also, surf over to our Eliot wiki. Click on your motif to open up your wiki page. On the wiki page for your motif: click on "edit page" at the top of the page; select an example of your motif from the poem; quote the example; then, explain the example - - what is happening with the motif at this point in the poem? what is the motif signifying at this point in the poem? how does this instance of the motif relate to other instances of the motif? Write as much as you can - -bonus points for length - - and type your name after your comments; click on "save."

For Tuesday, October 20

Don't forget, for Tuesday, you want to select one motif from the 15 or so that we collected from "Burial of the Dead" in The Waste Land. Find as many instances or examples of that motif in the rest of the poem as you can. Cite the lines where you find the motif. Remember - - you are looking for concrete examples of the motif and/or its variations. Bring this list into class.

Here's the list of motifs from our last class:

Seasons/natural time

life-in-death; undead; zombie

plagiarism/cultural pastiche

exile

voices/ventriloquy/polyphony

nostalgia/memory

dryness/drought vs. wetness/water

roots/plant/organic

"broken images"/isolate flecks/fragments

sailors/voyages/ocean

hyacinth girl: men and women; impotence

crowds

"unreal city"/ city/London

"hypocrite lecteur"/the reader

deaf/mute/blindness

mixing

The Waste Land

For Thursday, we'll continue with Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Here's a nice recording of Eliot reading the poem:

You might also want to check out this very interesting annotated, multimedia version of the poem.

Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946). A radical modernist in literature and life, Stein was both an avant garde textualist and a central organizing figure for expatriate modernists in Europe. Here's a link to her "The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind."