Multimedia
From The Waste Land Wiki
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| − | + | The emotional evocation of The Waste Land, of course, depends largely on the references and allusions it uses. For those well-versed in the western literary tradition, the connotations of each phrase and expression may be meaningful, but for the uninitiated, the meaning runs the risk of being obscured. | |
| − | The Waste Land as a | + | At first glance, the scattered images of a hundred different perspectives and interpretations drawn from The Waste Land can seem hopeless; some are so constrained to one-to-one interpretation of symbolisms that they seem hackneyed, others come across as so all-encompassing as to say nothing, and still others tend to be emotionally moving but stubbornly unstated and uninterpreted. Looking at the collection as a whole, however, it takes on a different sort of life. Just as The Waste Land contains the limited, often blatantly erroneous perspectives of many different perspectives, personalities, and opinions, melding them all into a sort of loose whole, the derivative work that surrounds it begins slowly to have a similar effect. |
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| + | It is here that the idea of the palimpsest comes into play. The Waste Land, with its collection of fragmented vignettes, easily emulates the written, scraped, and rewritten parchment of a palimpsest. While the derivative works accessible today are, for the most part, quite whole, they still manage to evoke a similar sense of fragmentation due to the sheer volume of material that renders the reader's grasp extremely limited in comparison. In today's Web 2.0 culture, oversaturated with information that is, more often than not, written off with a "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read) or a demand for SparkNotes, the overload tends to leave many people with a collection of bits and pieces that comprise an overall sense of the whole. Rather than following a logical progression, they are superimposed over one another like the various layers of a palimpsest, with only the boldest segments standing out. As a result, it is not necessarily the primary pieces of each "conversation" that comprise the overall meaning; rather, that which is most impactful ends up playing the primary role in the end. | ||
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| + | Considering T.S. Eliot's theory of the objective correlative, this raises the question of whether his intent concerning the emotional impact of the poem even comes through. To the layman who lacks the background of literary tradition necessary to decipher the layers of The Waste Land, for whom derivative works and multimedia play an even larger role in the interpretation of the poem, this question becomes even more relevant. | ||
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