Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Sussex

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, originally published in 1922, is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century – but it can also be a really hard read. It appears to ask the reader to come to it knowing a lot about ancient and modern languages, the history of English literature, the Bible, and classical mythology, just to name a few topics the poem references.

In this talk, Professor Thurschwell hopes to convince you that it is possible to read The Waste Land without a classical education. She will argue that the poem is really about what the title says it is about – waste – the waste products that Eliot sees engulfing the society of the early twentieth century, and waste in terms of history, including what gets left behind and forgotten.  She believes it is possible to extract meaning from The Waste Land, without having to take a crash course in Latin. In the course of the lecture Pamela will also touch on the place of footnotes, typists, and bad relationships in one of the twentieth century’s most enduring and frustrating Modernist masterpieces.