1 / 10

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 20/04/2009. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (written between 1910-1911 and published for the first time in 1915 in the magazine Poetry) .

paul
Download Presentation

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 20/04/2009

  2. Prufrock and OtherObservations(1917) • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (written between 1910-1911 and published for the first time in 1915 in the magazine Poetry). • In the whole collection the “subject” “sees” the world and is seen by it (continually modified / conditioned by his relation with the outside world) • No narrative development, although it contains the elements of a narrative. • Life cannot be reduced to plots

  3. Themes • Elite, people, roads, harboursassetting • Alienatedhumanity: • 13         In the room the women come and go 14        Talking of Michelangelo. (repetitions, refrain) • Loneliness and lack of communication: • 70           Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 71        And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes 72        Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?..

  4. Communication • Itdoesnotmatterwhethertheyspeak or not: thereis a radicalunderminingof the circuitofcommunication: • 'That is not what I meant at all. 98          That is not it, at all.' J.A. Prufrock is subject and object at one and the same time, so he cannot be a character. Irony does not confer identity and does not save him: 131      Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  5. Characters are notdefined in psychologicalterms, or in a confessionalromantic mode; they are measured in relation with the outside world: city, street, day and night (especiallydawn and dusk). Tensionsubject / objectdevelopsalongtheselines: • A) mentaltopography / urbantopography • B) perceptionofspace and time / day and night • C) characterasmask / tea as a social ceremony

  6. Serpieri • 1) “reality” depends on perception, the pointofviewof the “subject”; butthereis no hierarchicaldependence, not a privilegingof the subject. The subjectis “exposed” and appears in pieces. • Itisnot just a matterofbeingunableto express whatonehas inside, because the world wouldn’t understand, but a more radicalsenseofincommunicability, due to the lackof a privilegedperspective.

  7. Prufrock is “you”, “I”, we, “a pair of ragged claws”, a prophet, Lazarus, Hamlet. • A split subject: • 82        Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter • Destined to grow old, but always-already old. • The use of “And” and parataxis. • Epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVII) (Guido da Montefeltro)

  8. Public and private • Prufrock’s confession is possible only because, paradoxically, there is no audience as such. The audience becomes complicit; it is implicated (You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!, The Waste Land from Baudelaire). • “Pro-nominal comedy”

  9. Stephen Ullmann • 1) Anthropomorphic metaphors (Human – non human) • 2) Animal metaphors (non human-human) • 3) Transfer of sense from concrete to abstract and viceversa • 4) “synesthetic” metaphors (from one sense to another • In Prufrock, mostly 1) and 3)

  10. Leo Salingar • The speaker is vague, but the images are distinct. • Reaching forward only to fall back (“Let us go…) • Rhyming couplets and irregular verse, fixity and flux (streets… retreats; hotels… shells) • Fixity and flux: hard, gritty objects vs fluctuating and evasive thoughts. • Hints of something permanent which Prufrock can dimly perceive but cannot grasp.

More Related