Not a Waste Land?: A Freudo-Nietzschean Reinterpretation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2025.83Keywords:
Eliot, The Wasteland, Freud, Nietzsche, moralityAbstract
This paper aims to offer a reinterpretation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The author in this paper studies Eliot’s own takes on religion, morality, history and juxtaposes it with the understandings of German thinker Nietzsche. The author shows how these two thinkers belonging to two different philosophical positions, address a similar kind of moral stagnancy that limits the possibilities of modernity by redirecting its vector within the quagmire of a historical stasis. The author uses Freud’s theories to understand how within the semiotic body of the text the vector of free will interacts with this historical stasis. The Waste Land has been mainly interpreted as Eliot’s reaction to a morally corrupt post-war generation. However, through this study the author attempts to offer a reinterpretation of the text beyond the existing hegemonic epistemologies in the domain of Eliot studies and contends to argue that The Waste Land hints towards an alternative form of morality and thus provides a completely new understanding of the text.
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