These students, many of them bound to their home/bedroom offices since March 2020 are working passionately on their literary understanding. These blogs show a heightened creativity in times of crisis and reveal a wonderful range of experiences triggered by their reading of early twentieth century authors. What comes through very strongly is the extent to…
Tag: T.S.Eliot
T.S.Eliot, literary modernism and the quest for meaning.
T.S.Eliot, right from the start of his career was a passionate seeker for truth. This expressed itself in the metaphor of the journey which runs right through his whole work from “Prufrock” through to “The Four Quartets”. What truth was Eliot seeking? He was clearly living at a time of universal fragmentation, immediately after the…
East Coker- Four Quartets Session 3
Thank you all for your fabulous participation in our exploration of T.S. Eliot’s East Coker the poem that confirmed for him that he was actually in the process of writing the second of what would become The Four Quartets. Published on Good Friday 1940, just near the start of the Second World War, this poem…
American Modernism and Manifestos
Please find the audio lecture followed by the slides used and then the audio tutorial followed by the whiteboard image discussed. Modernism American 2019 Hi All, today we had a saunter through the highways and byways of American Modernism, beginning with William Carlos Williams and ending with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s parody of Adolf Hitler in The…
Art Consciousness and Spirit in Times of War
Today we explored Virginia Woolf (“The Mark on the Wall”), T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”. These are three amazing modernist authors who, in the shadow of war (both the First and Second World Wars) were trying to find a way through to some personal or spiritual certainty.…
Modernism: T.S.Eliot & Virginia Woolf.
The visit to the art gallery of NSW last week was a perfect introduction to what we entered into today. It makes so much more sense talking about Virginia Woolf’s “Stream of Consciousness” and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented narratives (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”- The Waste Land) afterhaving seen and discussed Picasso and Kirchner…
Unacknowledged Legislators!
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. Shelley was clearly moved to declare that poets had a fundamentally important role in the world, reminding humans about things that really mattered, beyond the entrapments of material possessions. So what was it that Shelley was so deeply drawn towards? If we look at the opening sentences…
American Modernism
Hi All, today we had a saunter through the highways and byways of American Modernism, beginning with William Carlos Williams and ending with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s parody of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator is one of the great modernist, linguistic deconstructions of political grandiosity. It is paralleled by Chaplin’s closing speech where, using an entirely different…
Brian Friel Faith Healer
This was an amazing play that really does take us into the heart of everything that the twentieth century was about. T.S. Eliot speaks about modern life as one where we are all “distracted from distraction by distraction”. We have seen how Gerard Manley Hopkins challenges the destructiveness, the distractedness of his times as, in…
George Orwell in the Mid Twentieth Century
George Orwell was deeply conscious of the way in which language can be both an instrument of freedom as well as oppression. He saw how the political violence that rose with the Twentieth Century was based essentially on an abuse of language. For example the ways in which imperialist powers in the 19th and early…
Early Twentieth Century Modernism: T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Dylan Thomas
Blog Topics for the Modernism Week 7 T. S. Eliot’s (don’t miss this link!) poem The Waste Land ends with the line “these fragments I have shored against my ruin”. This line has given its name to a new APP that has just come onto the market. Write a short review of this amazing APP and…
All Quiet on the Western Front- The Horrific Impact of War
The Death of Kemmerich All Quiet on the Western Front 1930 Erich Maria Remarque is an author whose message and appeal is universal. Read by Germans, French, English or Americans it spells out the tragic impact of war on the ordinary soldier. But what it also powerfully shows is that in the teeth of war, in…
20thC/ Visionary Imagination – Remembering Babylon- David Malouf- Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”
David Malouf is arguably one of the finest authors writing in English today. His deep interest in the way imagination is a tool for understanding the world more completely than any scientific or psychological analysis might do. His vision- through story telling- of how early colonists might have responded to an outcast (Gemmy Fairley) shows…
Twentieth Century Literature Week 6: Modernism
The visit to the art gallery of NSW last week was a perfect introduction to what we entered into today. It makes so much more sense talking about Virginia Woolf’s “Stream of Consciousness” and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented narratives (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”- The Waste Land) after having seen and discussed Picasso and…
Art & Spirit
This week in all our units we have been exploring the relationship between Art (poetry, painting, prose, music…) and that part of human nature that is termed Spirit. For William Blake and for D.H.Lawrence the division between Body and Spirit -central to many religious traditions- was something they wanted to challenge. As Blake pronounced in…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Summer 2023 
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