LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:6 June 2013
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.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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From the Wasteland to the Wretched Land:
A Comparative Study of J. S. Anand’s and T.S. Eliot’s Poetry

Roghayeh Farsi, Ph.D.
Neyshabur University

Abstract

The interrelationship between modernism and postmodernism has always been a moot point, hence evasive. Many postmodern thinkers and theorists have viewed this issue from a wide variety of angles. While, for Jean-Françoise Lyotard, “postmodernism is modernism at its nascent”, Linda Hutcheon and Ihab Hassan vote for an ironic and ambivalent relationship between these two. Some theorists dispense with the contextual aspects and accentuate solely the aesthetic traits; whereas some poststructuralists like Michel Foucault historicize and thereby politicize this controversial interrelationship at the cost of marginalizing the stylistic dimension.

The present paper compares T. S. Eliot’s modernist colonial wasteland and J. S. Anand’s postcolonial postmodernist wretched land portrait. This comparison aims at showing how the spatiotemporal travelling of the wasteland vision backgrounds the inflicted plight of the wretched land.

The present study adopts a Lyotard-Hutcheonian methodology and detects a dialogic relationship between the two poets. It is argued that in “writing back to the empire”, Anand portrays and laments the rise of the wretched land. The postmodern state of disbelief is the stretch of modernist doubt. This paper tracks a line of continuity in this comparative study. This paper takes Eliot’s Wasteland as the colonial heritage bequeathed under the rubric of civilization to the postcolonial generation, depriving it of its spiritual being. Anand’s poetry is the voice which laments this loss. The paper also pinpoints an ambivalent relationship between Anand and Eliot and thereby votes for the forked ironic tone which runs through the postcolonial portrait of the wretched land.

Key words: postcolonial, postmodernism, modernism, postmodernism

Interrelationship between Modernism and Postmodernism The interrelationship of modernism and postmodernism has always been a controversial issue. The very roots of modernism could be traced back to the Renaissance and the prophetic hail of Francis Bacon to science and the experimental approach. But modernism as a purely cultural movement emerged gradually after the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the eighteenth century and flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century in the form of civilization and urbanization, hence modernity.

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

Roghayeh Farsi, Ph.D.
Neyshabur University
Neyshabur, Khorasan Razavi
Iran
rofarsi2013@gmail.com
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