ROUNDTABLE MEETINGS

Reading the First World War Through T S Eliot’s Poetry

Nagihan Haliloğlu

Saturday, November 29, 2014 5:00 PM Salon: ŞAKİR KOCABAŞ SALONU

On November 29th 2014, Center for Art Studies will host Nagihan Haliloğlu under the Kırkambar Talks.  Haliloğlu will deliver a speech on “Reading the First World War Through T S Eliot’s Poetry”. The event will be held in Şakir Kocabaş Hall of the Foundation for Sciences and Arts at 17:00.

Eliot’s work is often read for how he deals with ‘anxiety of influence’. Taking note of this anxiety, this presentation aims to read the traces of WWI in the poetry of TS Eliot, particularly in The Waste Land (1922) and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). The search for a new aesthetic in the British world of letters gained momentum in the years of the WWI and its aftermath. One of the war’s influences on modernist writers can be said to be an aesthetics of fragmentation which Eliot recognizes and names as such in his own work. His poetry is informed not only by the physical, bodily fragmentation of Europe’s youth in the trenches, but also an effort to bring the fragments of primarily European culture together. Different from what is known as ‘WWI Poetry’ that usually depicts the horror and solidarity of the trenches, Eliot’s poetry engages with the Europeanrivalries that lead to war and with the almost uncanny and unjust peace that is supposed to have put an end to it. Eliot points to the continental uneasiness that signals the coming of a new war and is keen to portray the local concerns in London, using his polyphonic style, introducing us to several classes in Britain at the same time. Bringing fragments of the universal and the personal together, Eliot tries, setting himself very modernist goals, to give a full picture of the world as he knows it. This presentation will draw attention to how he articulates his efforts by using the same metaphors for the anxieties relating to war and to literary influence.

The event will be held in Turkish, and is free to public.

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