Journal of
Undergraduate Research
Volume 2, Issue 2 - November 2000
Pedagogy and The Waste Land
G. Michael Palmer
Rich with images, sounds, and allusions, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land often becomes a literary illusion for those trying to unshore its fragments from its ruins. Since its publication in 1922, countless essays, books, and debates have tried to elucidate the mysteries of the poem. Many of these efforts have been aimed at the teaching of the poem. The most recent comprehensive collection of such articles is Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, published in 1988 by the Modern Language Association and edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Dr. Brooker's book covers tremendous ground, from Dante to the Hindu religion to love to the 1920s. In the twelve years since 1988, however, one great revolution has changed the way knowledge and information are collected and presented, the revolution of the computer.
Scholars of The Waste Land have tried to explain it through the body, through political ideals, through imagery, and always through Eliot's extensive allusions. The arguments in these essays are, as are all good arguments, direct and to the point. The problem this creates, however, is in the teaching of the poem. Searching through the many opposing viewpoints contained in the ever-growing number of writings on The Waste Land is difficult even with the aid of the internet and search engines. It is nearly impossible, in an age of exploding classroom size and tightening schedules, for an instructor to find the time to go to a library, search through its databases, and then trudge around finding relevant articles or explanations of the poem. And unless the teacher happens to be an Eliot scholar, it is unlikely that they will have more than one or two books containing an essay on The Waste Land. Even then, they might not be able to get a good cross-section of current scholarship on the poem.
The Waste Land has found an electronic calling in the last few years as a subject for hypertextual integration. Enthusiasts of the poem add links on individual words to definitions, explanations of allusions, images, and sounds. Many of these hypertexts can be found on the World Wide Web, and there is at least one CD-ROM devoted to such a rendering of the poem. To my knowledge there has not been, however, a hypertextual presentation of the myriad resources available on the poem, nor an essay dealing with the poem's inherent hypertextuality. In as much as my project is a text unto itself, I hope to achieve this in a way. My main goal, though, is to present The Waste Land, its scholarship, and its resources in as clear a way as possible, to instructors teaching the poem and their students.
To address this problem I have constructed a website at http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/gmpalmer on space donated by The University of Florida. This site contains methods and suggestions for teaching The Waste Land, organized into grade levels for college and high school, as well as excerpts from representative essays on the poem, links to other websites concerned with the poem, and hypertexts of the poem itself. In preparation for this website, I have surfed the web, surfed the classrooms, and surfed the library, searching for the best ideas about the poem, and best ways of presenting them. As I have said, there is a plethora of Waste Land studies. A search on the Modern Language Association's bibliographical search engine for only journal essays, for only the years 1988-1999, and for only essays concerning The Waste Land yields well over two hundred results. A search on Yahoo! gives more than three thousand. A website that dealt with all of the resources on The Waste Land would be immense as well as confusing. In building a website, I had to cull representative essays and representative websites, trying to portray as a whole the body of Waste Land scholarship. My own scholarship is, of course, incomplete. There are almost no articles dealing with gender studies, Marxist, or other currently popular scholarly forms in the collection of essays, and I am sure that dozens of well constructed websites have been left off of my lists for lack of space or failure to find them. As to the websites, I simply do not have the time to hunt through thousands of pages of the internet, looking for the best links, and as for the essays, I did skim over all two hundred some of the journal essays I found in the above described search, and only came up with a small handful of essays dealing with The Waste Land in the current scholarly fashions, and so was not inclined to misrepresent their numbers among studies of the poem.
In the months leading up to the construction of the site, my mentor Dr. Marsha Bryant and I constructed a survey to distribute to senior English majors at the University of Florida. The survey asked such questions as "how much time have you spent in classes studying The Waste Land," and "what were the most and least effective strategies your instructors used?" I also spent a class period with Dr. Bryant's Modern American Poetry class, which was studying The Waste Land at that time. The students gave me essays with suggestions of methods they would like to see employed for the teaching of the poem, and suggestions for making the website "student friendly." While greatly assisting me in the design and content of the website, this very informal research has also hindered me in unbalancing the website towards student interests. With direct input from Dr. Bryant and indirect suggestions from the mostly professors writing the essays read, I have less teacherly input than student input. I hope, however, than instead of a handicap, this can be a cornerstone of the website, a pedagogical map written by the one being taught, instead of the one teaching.
The website is constructed to be navigable in four distinct ways. An instructor can choose between grade levels of high school and lower or upper division college. Each of these links goes to pages with specific information and links, to essays and other resources, pointed at teaching The Waste Land to students of those grades. An instructor can also select from essays, links, timelines, and other choices to navigate the site in a more global way. The pages are interface among themselves and other places on the World Wide Web, allowing teachers to find all kinds of resources, including supplies and resources from hard to find and out of the way places.
The most extensive feature of the website is the section of excerpts
from essays on The Waste Land. This section is divided and subdivided
according to topic. The three main categories are Intertextual Approaches,
Historical Contexts, and Explicative Approaches. The first heading is
further broken down into Ante Modernist, Modernist, and Post Modernist
Approaches. Each of
these are broken down into such groups as Shakespeare, Dante, and Visual
Texts. These essays all deal with The Waste Land in the light of another
(or several other) literary text. They are broken up by the order in
which they are influenced by or had influence on The Waste Land.
Also divided on influence on The Waste Land are Myth/Religion and Historical Approaches, subgroups of Historical Contexts. These are divided from Intertextual Approaches in their inauthorship, that is, their availability to the Western experience as a whole, such as Victorianism, Religion, and the wreck of the Titanic.
The final category is separated from Explicative Approaches to include formal elements, such as word order and metrical structure, to explications on the poem, such as the images of the body and of rape within The Waste Land.
These categories were decided on in order to facilitate the greatest navigability and the most amount of innerconnectedness possible. Many of the essays fit into more than one category, ensuring the highest level of information to users of the website.
The remainder of the website, hypertexts, links to other pages, timelines, and other information, allow pedagogues and scholars to find easily the information they need. They link users to the best and most comprehensive hypertexts I could find, as well as the top T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land websites available, plus information on the writing of the poem, Eliot,s life, and the late 1910s, early 20s, and links and contact information for supplies and resources collected in an easy to use manner.
I believe that the website is an especially pertinent form for presenting The Waste Land, as the poem itself is a collection of links, "fragments Eliot calls them, pasted together in an ordered and meticulous fashion, as evidenced by the extensive manuscript edits and notes, to present many beautiful ideas. Eliot in his poem looks at the fragmented and chaotic state of the world, and attempts through words to "set [it] in order. I can only hope to do as much.
The greatest feature of the website, however, has not been created yet. As a collection of binary digits on a computer somewhere at the University of Florida, the website is always subject to change, something a book cannot do. If Dr. Brooker had set up a BBS station in 1988 instead of a website, something she certainly would not have done, considering the relative lack of knowledge among the public about such things, and the unavailability of personal modems, I would likely not be doing this. Hopefully, though, I will be able to work with scholars and instructors of The Waste Land to continually update the website to reflect to current state of Waste Land scholarship.
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