Saturday, February 27, 2016
Fragmentation
I thought it was interesting that this poem was so fragmented. For me, personally, it was hard to follow. It reminded me of a book I read one time titled Identitical. This book constantly switched between two twins' perspectives of life. It was fragmented and the reader didn't realize the perspective changed until halfway through the new twin. When I read the Wasteland I thought it was weird my mind went straight to identical but that is how I got through understanding the reading.
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It is pretty disorienting to read fragmented pieces of literature, as normally I feel like we are used to reading books/novels/poems from a first person narration. When you have a first person narrator, not only do you know who is talking the entire time, but you also get the sense of being able to follow the narrators stream of consciousness. You get neither of these privileges while reading Eliot's poem. But, not only is Eliot's poem disorienting, but also interesting to read it like that because it is something I'm not used to and something that takes more effort to understand, and that kind of challenge is intriguing.
I have always had a very tough time learning this kind of literature. I am a very chronological thinker, so math, tasks, and stories that do not go in a specific order and follow a set of numbers/activities/characters the whole time from start to finish severely confuse me. At dinner last night my mom asked me what I was reading and I told her the Waste Land. She asked what it was about and I could barely even explain it. Really, what is TWL about? I told her the first few thing that came to my mind - rape culture in an idealized love environment and its relations to false expectations, various different speakers explaining their current situations, and lots and lots of allusions to greco-roman and non-western civilization/religion. I will be going back and reviewing TWL before writing my outline, so my perspective might change. But off the top of my head that is what I thought. What comes to mind for you?
I had the same trouble @jack. I was talking to my mom about my outline and she wanted to help me, and asked me what it was about and I was just kinda like... I don't really know... It's just a lot of little stories about rape and allusions to Greek mythology and different religions... I'm not sure it's really about anything... And then she got all snarky and wanted to read it herself and I wanted to be like you're not gonna get it... But she probably would've assumed I was calling her stupid when in reality i didn't understand it without our English class. To me it was more of a puzzle with multiple different solutions that it was "about" anything.
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