Eliot to Derrida

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Prologue

   • John Harwood

   Pages 1-29

3. The Invention of Modernism

   • John Harwood

   Pages 30-60

4. ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’: Pound, Eliot and The Waste Land

   • John Harwood

   Pages 61-85

5. Death by Exegesis

   • John Harwood

   Pages 86-109

6. The Case of the Missing Subject

   • John Harwood

   Pages 110-139

7. The Quest for the One True Meaning

   • John Harwood

   Pages 140-159

8. ‘Regret Impossible Stop Writing’: The Labyrinth of Theory

   • John Harwood

   Pages 160-183

9. The Law and the Prophets

   • John Harwood

   Pages 184-209

10. Back Matter

    Pages 210-244

    PDF

'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating enrolment for a university course in modern English or European literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and `postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.

• fragment
• Interpretation
• Jacques Derrida
• law
• Modernism
• poverty
• development aid

• Flinders University of South Australia, Australia

  John Harwood

Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I. A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around 'modernism' and 'postmodernism'. Tracing the reception of T. S. Eliot's poems - notably The Waste Land - from the earliest reviews to the post-war era of mass-produced interpretations, it shows how the insights of Eliot's first readers were lost in a fog of reverent explication. Just as 'Mr. Eliot' was co-opted by Richards, Leavis and the New Critics to serve as their patron saint, so Derrida - perhaps the last person Eliot would have chosen as his successor - became the principal guru of the new theoretical dispensation. And just as the quest for the One True Meaning collapsed under the weight of its inherent contradictions, so the quest for the One True Theory was destined to end in factional brawling between rival personality cults. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book. 

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