Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation

Both a part-by-part analysis of the poem with periodic summations and a meditation on the limits of interpretation and the problematic nature of reading in the late twentieth century. Brooker (English, Eckerd College) and the late Joseph Bentley (English, U. of South Florida) argue that Eliot early on anticipated the basic insights of contemporary theory with regard to the manner in which modernist texts both insist upon and defeat interpretation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR