＜100ページで学ぶ名著＞Ｔ・Ｓ・エリオット『完全なる批評家』 An Analysis of T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood : Essays on Poetry and Criticism

著者名：Teubner, Rachel

Macat Library（2017/07/05発売）

• 言語：ENG
• ISBN：9781912302864
• eISBN：9781351353397

Description

The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the study of literature and its production by redefining the nature of tradition and the artist's relation to it.At a time when the word “traditional” had become a way of damning with faint praise by reference to the past, Eliot reinterpreted the term to mean something entirely different. It is not, he argues, something just “handed down,” but, instead, a prize to be obtained “by great labour,” not least in the making of a huge effort of understanding how the past fits together. Seen thus, Eliot suggests, a literary and artistic tradition “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” – and it is not just past, but present as well. For Eliot, “art never improves,” but only changes, and each part of the tradition is constantly being reinterpreted in light of what is added to the whole. The role of the poet, in Eliot's view, is to subjugate their own personality, and become “a receptacle,” in which “numberless feelings, phrases, images… can unite to form a new compound.” Redefining the issue of poets' relations to the past in this new way is a fine example of creative thinking, and Eliot’s ability to connect existing concepts in new ways was what gave weight to the argument that he advanced: that poets cannot succeed without understanding that they are taking their place on a continuum that stretches back to all their predecessors, and incorporate the ideas, strengths and failings of the entire body of work that those poets represented.

Table of Contents

Ways in to the Text 

Who was T. S. Elliott? 

What does The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism Say? 

Why does The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism Matter? 

Section 1: Influences 

Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context 

Module 2: Academic Context 

Module 3: The Problem 

Module 4: The Author's Contribution 

Section 2: Ideas 

Module 5: Main Ideas 

Module 6: Secondary Ideas 

Module 7: Achievement 

Module 8: Place in the Author's Work 

Section 3: Impact 

Module 9: The First Responses 

Module 10: The Evolving Debate 

Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 

Module 12: Where Next? 

Glossary of Terms 

People Mentioned in the Text 

Works Cited