T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. Reading Literally, Reading Laterally

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 1-17

3. Turning and Acceptance in Ash-Wednesday: Affirming Life’s Newness and Joy

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 18-31

4. Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza: Some Forms of Approach to “Amalgamating Disparate Experience”

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 32-45

5. The Gift Half Understood: Incarnation as “Impossible Union,” Way, and Intersection

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 46-54

6. The Word, Words, and the World: Redeeming the Word, or Some Implications of Incarnation for Reading and Writing about Literature

   • G. Douglas Atkins

   Pages 55-62

7. Back Matter

   Pages 63-71

   PDF

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

• English literature
• experience
• George Eliot
• literature
• love
• Spinoza
• truth
• writing

"In this slim volume focusing on T. S. Eliot's poems in Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets, Atkins proposes first to challenge the 'deep' reading of Eliot that finds meaning buried beneath symbols, and second, to refute the claim that Eliot is an idealist seeking to transcend the material world. In place of the so-called deep reading, Atkins offers both a 'lateral' reading (i.e., reading a particular poem alongside other work by that author) and a 'literal' reading, which purports to take 'the plain meaning of the words' as Eliot's intended meaning. Although he concedes at points that this plain meaning can be perplexing or enigmatic, he insists that when read literally, both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets pivot on the figure of the Incarnation - the central mystery of Christianity . . . this is a provocative argument, and the point Atkins makes regarding Eliot's idealism is persuasive. Summing Up: Recommended." - Choice

G. Douglas Atkins is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Reading T.S. Eliot: 'Four Quartets' and the Journey Towards Understanding; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; and Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including NEH, Mellon, and American Council of Learned Societies and was the winner of the Kenyon Review's prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose.

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