T.S. Eliot, Collaboration, and the Quandaries of Assessment in a Rapidly Changing World.
1997; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoIn a corporate world that has all but abandoned individual performance appraisal for team review, schools - and perhaps remote fire observation stations - are last holdouts. Continuing on this path, Mr. Wineburg maintains, will ensure that chasm between schools and real world continues to widen. Ezra Pound called it a masterpiece, of most important 19 pages in English. Conrad Aiken heralded it as of most moving and original poems of our time. Even trenchant I. A. Richards said that it expressed the plight of a whole generation.(1) Waste Land, T. S. Eliot's brilliant and infuriating critique of modernity, is known by anyone who has ever taken a college literature course. Its jarring juxtaposition of classic and modern, its magisterial allusions and disquieting have occupied - and mystified - literary for nearly a century, not to mention baffled freshmen who have spent untold hours trying to decipher its meaning. Published in 1922, poem immediately thrust Eliot into limelight, but story behind poem remained shrouded in mystery - until 1968. In that year, original manuscript of Waste Land was discovered, and a facsimile edition appeared three years later.(2) This edition showed a typewritten version of Waste Land with whole stanzas crossed out and marginal comments such as these: too loose (p. 32), inversions not warranted by any real exigence of meter (p. 52), dogmatic deduction and wobbly as well (p. 23). When Eliot wrote cautious critics in section called Fire Sermon, marginal note focused on word cautious, pointing out that, when speaking of London, this adjective is tauto[logical] (p. 27). In a handwritten section, critic scrawled a large X across page and in a marginal squib issued this judgment: Bad, but can't attack until I get typescript (p. 55). The man behind X was esteemed poet Ezra Pound. Eliot had corresponded with Pound since 1914, and elder poet remained a benefactor throughout Eliot's lifetime. The final form of Waste Land, whole sections elided by Pound's trenchant pen, is impossible to conceptualize apart from this literary collaboration. What we had imagined was Eliot's work turns out to be a curious mixture of Eliot and Pound. Waste Land is a literary achievement. But what if we were to consider it from another angle - not as a piece of high art, but instead as an entry in one of new assessments springing up all over country? Imagine that Waste Land were submitted as part of a writing portfolio used to certify accomplished teachers of creative writing. How should we regard this entry? The composition of poem flies in face of traditional notions of testing and measurement, particularly notion of psychometric authenticity, assurance that a test reflects a person's own efforts and accomplishments, not those of others. Indeed, when considered from vantage point of traditional educational theory, status of Waste Land becomes murkier closer we look. At least three issues immediately present themselves. First, what is psychometric authenticity of this work? How can we even begin to separate Eliot's contribution from Pound's? Second, when evaluating Eliot's literary potential, how do we resolve issue of equity? How do we compensate or, more modestly, take into account fact that, in completing his portfolio entry, Eliot could draw on a mind like Ezra Pound's, while other poets toiled in isolation, or worse, had colleagues who wrote doggerel? Third, at what point does it become morally questionable to put Eliot's name on entry labeled Waste Land? At what point would Pound's help become too much help? At what point would Eliot cross some invisible line between a poem produced with aid and one produced with illegitimate aid? What if Pound not only suggested new stanzas but wrote them himself? …
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