Eliot’s The Waste Land: Defamiliarization of Past and Personality

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that T. S. Eliot’s emphasis on tradition and impersonality is, in fact, a device to defamiliarise ‘past’ and ‘personality’. My argument is based on Victor Shkolovsky’s notion of ‘defamiliarization’, which maintains that devices of various kinds are used in literature ‘to defamilaise language and to awaken readers to the intricacy and texture of verbal structure. Such defamiliarization is, therefore, the manner in which poetry functions to rejuvenate and revivify language’. I further argue that Shkolovsky’s notion of ‘defamiliarization’ should be seen in a new perspective because, firstly, it is not only ‘a feature of text but of interaction of text with context’ and secondly, it ‘cannot be separated from the psychology of the reader or from the particular and changing social and historical context which conditions it’.  Eliot’s The Waste Land (1992), the paper explores, is not merely a ‘new tissue of past citations’ but a rereading of the habitual historical perception, a vital reaction against the misreading of the cultural past ‘making the old conventions alive and significant for contemporary readers’, making the past with all its ‘pastness’ and personality with its ‘extinction’ appear extraordinary, atypical, composite, shocking, and novel. The descriptive-analytical approach is followed in this research.