Publication Date

1-1985

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Dorothy McMahon, William McMahon, Frank Steele

Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

In Poets of Reality, Joseph Hillis Miller seeks to establish T.S. Eliot as a precursor of the modern movement towards romantic. subjectivism. By applying his phenomenological critique, Miller claims that several major modern writers, including Eliot, adopt aesthetics based on various forms of philosophical monism.

The point underlying this thesis is that Eliot stands opposed to any such position and, until 1930, breaks with philosophy, monistic or otherwise. His art from this period is instead characterized by a search for solution in poetic artifice, a pure art. However, with "Ash Wednesday," the poet once again enters fully into the realm of ideas, and by Four Quartets has achieved a synthesis of art and idea that is clearly dualistic in nature and affirms the importance of a progressive, and not destructive tradition. All of this he finally undergirds with a logocentric belief in language as a vehicle to be purified, far from the linguistic nihilism of Miller's "Yale School" colleague, Jacques Derrida.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, British Isles

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