The Other Side of Despair: The Search for Meaning in T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land'

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 Master of Arts in the Humanities Program.

Mentioned in this episode:

• 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