LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 1 January 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.


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An Analysis of Deviations of Register in T. S. Eliot’s Poem
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Muhammad Saleem, M.Phil.


Abstract

This paper analyses T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock as a piece of literary collage by way of exploring various deviations of register in it. T. S. Eliot’s modern poetic sensibility, in its creative processes, tends to hug the shores of different registers, discourses and disciplines of knowledge. The words that he borrows from registers of medical profession, marine world, smoky atmosphere, polluted urban landscapes, religion, commonplace and absurd current cultural behaviours and literature are metaphorised and proverbialised in his literary collage. Their surrealistic nature does at once familiarize them with the reader. This orientation of modernity helps the poet to portray skillfully the feelings, situations and dimensions of modern life actualized through characters like Prufrock.

The study at the lexical, phrase and clause level consists of three phases of identification, description and interpretation of the violations of poetic register in the poem. These borrowings from different registers and discourses are not only to defamiliarise and foreground the text; they also betray the exact size and colour of the psychological conditions and emotions of the persona. These irregularities of content that point towards the unification of modern learning and knowledge are the chief sources to prove strength, shine and weave of the modern poem.

Key Words: Deviations of Register, Literary Stylistics, T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Foregrounding.

1. Introduction

Learning, in modern terms, is no more linked with once watertight compartmentalization of different disciplines of knowledge; vast fuzziness at the boundaries of disciplines and overlapping of the modern branches of knowledge is a common phenomenon today. Under the influence of this fashion/trend the modern poets “asset their freedom from constraints of ‘poetical’ language” with “an unprecedented audacity” (Leech, 1989, p. 49-50).


This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Muhammad Saleem
Assistant Professor of English
Government Postgraduate College
Sheikhupura
Punjab, Pakistan
zaryabsaleem@gmail.com

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