Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems
- 2 Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history
- 3 Eliot, eros, and desire: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”
- 4 T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory
- 5 Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory: reading Orlando
- 6 Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse
- 7 Remembering what has “almost already been forgotten”: where memory touches history
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems
- 2 Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history
- 3 Eliot, eros, and desire: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”
- 4 T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory
- 5 Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory: reading Orlando
- 6 Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse
- 7 Remembering what has “almost already been forgotten”: where memory touches history
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Summary
WRITING TIME
I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident – say the fall of a flower – might contain it. My theory being that the actual event practically does not exist – nor time either.
Virginia Woolf, Diary, 23 November 1926This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work.
Marcel Proust, Time RegainedTo write of memory, time, and desire in early twentieth-century literature is to touch the place where modernism's intense concerns with its historicity and belatedness converge with the versions of temporalities and sexualities it was articulating; it is to investigate the sustained provocation of a modernist predisposition to think of the past through the language of sensuality and eros. T. S. Eliot's now well-known lines from the opening of The Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain,” capture an agonizingly raw protestation within the modernist project, offering one of those rare moments when a poetic conceit happens to express a key dilemma of the time.
- Type
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- Information
- Modernism, Memory, and DesireT. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008