Pre-Postmodernism in THE WASTE LAND

27-4-12

¿Postmodernist features in "The Waste Land"? E.g. T. S. Eliot's use of footnotes to comment or explain his own poem in a language which hovers between the cryptic and the academic tone. This didn't sound like experimental writing in the 1920s - more like pedantry I guess - but now it can be seen as a pre-postmodernist strategy, and an ironic return to some 17th-century metaphysical attitudes, or an influx of early modern Menippean satire. Although you might well argue that this only amounts to a rereading and revaluing of what is it that Modernism was really about.

(From a discussion at ResearchGate on postmodern modernists).