Reading the Waste Land with the #Metoo Generation by Megan Quigley 1 Reviews: Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel Rev

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Reading the Waste Land with the #Metoo Generation by Megan Quigley 1 Reviews: Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel Rev The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society Number 97 Spring 2019 CONTENTS Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation By Megan Quigley 1 Reviews: Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel Rev. by John Whittier- Ferguson 2 The #MeToo Panelists: Janine Utell, Michelle Alexis Taylor, Megan Quigley, Javier Marías’s Berta Isla Nancy Gish, Erin Templeton (Sumita Chakraborty and Ria Banerjee not pictured) Rev. by Giuliana Ferreccio 4 Blasphemous Modernism, by Reading The Waste Land with the Steve Pinkerton #MeToo Generation Rev. by Ian Clark 5 Old Toffer’s Book of Consequen- By Megan Quigley tial Dogs, by Christopher Reid Villanova University Rev. by John Whittier- For the 2018 conference of the T. S. Eliot Society, I organized a peda- Ferguson 6 gogically focused roundtable, “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation,” in response to the coincidence of a renaissance in Eliot stud- th CFP: 40 Annual Meeting of ies and a new urgency among feminists—an urgency brought to bear, at our the International T. S. Eliot roundtable, on how we might read and teach Eliot’s most famous poem. Society 3 The “new Eliot,” appearing in thousands of recently published and exten- sively annotated pages, awaits scholarly appraisal, but the old Eliot is also Public Sightings 7 changing rapidly, as students interrogate The Waste Land, this quintessential Eliot News & Society Notes 8 high modernist text, with new eyes in the #MeToo era. From Title IX of- ficers at universities to the #SayHerName movement, from pussy hats to Centennial Focus 9 battles over transgender bathrooms, our students are more sensitized to and informed about the battles that rage over gender, sexuality, intersectional- Abstracts from Recent ism, and power than they were just a very short while ago. The first time I Conferences 13 heard The Waste Land called an “abortion poem,” I thought I had misheard Membership Roster 19 my student; now I hear it frequently (and convincingly) called a poem that stages and performs racial and gender violence and investigates trans* expe- T. S. Eliot International Summer rience. My own teachers directed me away from Lil to Philomel to Nightin- School 2019 Announcement 21 gales and Keats. Our students still want Keats, but they also want to discuss, really discuss, the assault on the typist. Report on Summer School 2018 My introduction and my contributors’ essays have been issued in full By Kirsten Dey 21 in Modernism / modernity’s Print Plus Cluster. The contributors include: Ria Volume 2 of The T. S. Eliot Banerjee (Guttman Community College, CUNY), Sumita Chakraborty Studies Annual 23 continued on p. 10 Published by the International T. S. Eliot Society, a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary organization REVIEWS conceptions that too often still characterize our ap- Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, proaches to (and our conclusions about) religion and by Craig Bradshaw Woelfel the aesthetic in the twentieth century: that in an age of waning belief, modern art somehow becomes a Columbia, SC: University of South Caro- surrogate for religion; that art and the aesthetic are lina Press, 2018. 228 pages. fundamentally “secular and nonreligious modes” (14); that “modernist invocations of religion” are therefore Reviewed by John Whittier-Ferguson necessarily “inauthentic or abortive . or presented University of Michigan, Ann Arbor only in a fragmented sense as part of an aesthetics of patchwork citation” (14). Woelfel astutely points out, At the conclusion to his fine study of religious too, that the “linear narratives” of belief that under- belief in the writings of T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, write so many accounts of twentieth-century authors’ Craig Woelfel exhorts his readers. “[W]e ought to be spiritual lives “rely on ironically premodern and high- having different and better discussions” (172) about ly monolithic conceptions of subjectivity” (15). Under the matters with which Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Woelfel’s scrutiny, the very terms in which the topic is centrally concerned: the nature and status of belief of faith is often entertained in studies of the mod- in the early twentieth century and in studies of mod- erns seem clumsy and reductive: “the question worth ernism; what conversion and Christian practice meant asking when we look at specific authors and works in Eliot’s life and work, and what mysticism meant in is not first ‘what’ or ‘when’ someone believed or did Forster’s; how both men understood belief and what not, but what it means in modernity to say ‘I believe parts faith and doubt played in their art and in their in X’” (17). It’s easy to feel, reading Woelfel, that we essays. Woelfel invokes William James’s seminal study ought to have known better than ever to have resolved of religious experience in his title and uses James and and oversimplified this subject. Varieties of Aesthetic Evelyn Underhill to illuminate the complexity of in- Experience provides us with “a weightier Forster who quiries into the subject of mysticism and belief in the deserves a place in serious literary modernism; and period. He also makes sustained use of the philosoph- an Eliot who, even post-1926, remains dynamic and ical-cultural work of Charles Taylor, from whom he modernist—and, frankly, possibly relevant for more takes the crucial concept of “cross-pressured” thought, than just a coterie of readers” (33). which proves central to this book’s enterprise. Rather And when he turns to pre-conversion Eliot (the than adhering to the simplistic, schematic narrative post-and-ante biographical narrative itself now seems of a sea of faith receding before the advent of en- simplistic), Woelfel saves us from familiar, essen- lightened, secular, modern thought or asking when, tially uninteresting questions concerning if or how whether, or how his writers join or desert the camps we might mine the ore of belief from the rocks of of the faithful or the unbelievers, Woelfel insists that The Waste Land. Drawing a pointed distinction be- “modernism reflects a moment in which religious en- tween the ascent toward revelation that characterizes gagement is situated always already within, and not the Purgatorio and the end of Eliot’s artfully ruined mutually exclusive of, a modern secular background” long poem, Woelfel notes that the contrast between (8). “Cross-pressuring” means that every position is Dante’s and Eliot’s texts “gets us closer to understand- taken in full awareness of its opposite: religious ortho- ing what Charles Taylor meant when he said that doxy calls forth humanism; immanence and transcen- ‘modernization is not a narrative of unbelief replac- dence, rationality and the spiritual are bound tightly ing belief; . actually, the change is more drastic. It together. “The discourse surrounding religious experi- is more like cacophony replacing meaning as such.’ ence in the early twentieth century,” Woelfel insists, Eliot’s poem presents a vision of the modern back- “was an incredibly new one, and one that reflected ground of belief that suggests that a question such as with unique force the peculiarities of modernist be- ‘Is there revelation at the end of The Waste Land?’ is no lief as a cross-pressured space” (19). Eliot and Forster, longer relevant. Whether the answer to that question along with other “modern, cross-pressured” seekers, is yes or no, we are thrown into a tangle of second- lived with belief and doubt in unequal, often-chang- ary questions about that revelation’s authenticity and ing measure, holding “both secular / scientific and re- authority” (69). Signs lie all around us, and we may ligious / experiential viewpoints in suspension” (24). sometimes take them for wonders, “but both the poet Important as this book is for the study of Eliot and Forster, it is no less crucial as a corrective to mis- continued on p. 11 Time Present 2 Spring 2019 ANNUAL MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT The 40th Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society St. Louis September 27–29, 2019 Call for Papers ogy of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910—1935 (Toronto, 2014), and an edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender But- The Society invites proposals for papers to be tons (Broadview, 2018). Over the years Diepeveen has presented at our annual meeting, this year held in coauthored, with Timothy van Laar, several books on St. Louis. Clearly organized proposals of about 300 contemporary visual art, the most recent being Art- words, submitted as Word or PDF documents, on world Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value (Oxford, 2013). any topic reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical sketches, should be emailed by June 1, 2019, to [email protected], with the subject Peer Seminars heading “Conference Proposal.” The peer seminar format offers the opportunity Each year the Society awards a prize to the best to share your work in a more in-depth way with a paper given by a new Eliot scholar. Graduate students group of participants whoREVIEWS share your interests. Par- and recent PhDs are eligible (degree received in 2015 ticipants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 or later for those not yet employed in a tenure-track pages) by September 1; peer seminars will meet to position; 2017 or later for those holding a tenure- discuss the pre-circulated papers for two hours on the track position). If you are eligible for the award, please first day of the 2019 Eliot Society conference, Friday, mention this fact in your submission. The Fathman September 27. Membership in each peer seminar is Young Scholar Award, which includes a monetary limited to twelve on a first-come, first-served basis. prize, will be announced at the final session of the Please enroll by July 15, by sending an email with the meeting.
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