Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land.

The lecture explores the personal, historical, and literary contexts of Eliot’s poem. Through an engagement with the Western tradition that is simultaneously rich and fragmented, The Waste Land confronts cultural and personal crises that have atrophied both memory and desire. Snook finds in Eliot’s work a mournful modernism that serves as a serious and searching rejoinder to the more frivolous and enervated responses present in some modernist schools, most notably Dadaism.

This lecture was delivered on April 15th, 2024 at Ralston College’s Savannah campus, during the final term of the second year of the MA in the Humanities Program. Applications are now open for next year’s MA program.

Full scholarships are available. https://www.ralston.ac/apply

Mentioned in this episdoe: 

T. S. Eliot
“The Waste Land”
The Dial
Kathleen Raine
Virgil, Aeneid
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”
Eliot, The Family Reunion
Henri Bergson
Bertrand Russell
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Leonard Woolf
Ezra Pound
James Joyce, Ulysses
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Oswald Spengler, Decline and Fall of the West
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Claude McCay, Harlem Shadows
August Strindberg
Neo-impressionism
Cubism
Dadaism
Surrealism
Futurism
Taxi Driver (film)
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, War, the World’s Only Hygiene
Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto
“That Shakespearian Rag”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
World War I
Henry James
F. H. Varley
Punic Wars
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
The Tempest
Modernism
Collage
Pablo Picasso
Georges Braque
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase; Fountain
Montage
F. H. Bradley
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Plato
The Matter of Britain
Jessie Weston
James Frazer
Richard Wagner, Parsifal
Augustine, Confessions
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
Tower of Babel
Petronius, The Satyricon
Michelangelo, frescoes of Sistine Chapel
Virgil, Eclogues
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Franz Kafka
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women; A Game at Chess
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
Charles Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur”
Fredrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals