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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) - Coggle Diagram
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
The motif of the transcendence of time within a context of eternal ennui.
"Evenings, mornings, afternoons"
Cumulative listing. Person self-conscious of their identity.
Self-conscious social conformity erodes desire for action and hides deeper needs for the self.
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Motif of pervasive ennui of his experience dislocating temporal markings of time.
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"There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet"
Consistent repetition. Synecdoche of "faces" representing Nietzchean mask-wearing persona. The persona is aware and weary of the eternal ennui created by Decadent society and meaningless social interactions, but cannot escape it.
Tedious mental processes which finally lead to the point of action or resolution but he evades a question because of his self-consciousness.
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Represents the loss and hidden identity of the modern man through illusion and façade.We are shaped by our social milieu - social paralysis and performance.
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Bergsonian temporal, internal markings of time.
Rigidity and constrained by structure.
Synecdochic fragmentation.
Subversion of Romanticism and the male hero.
Modern man creating artificial environment to conceal deeper emotional and spiritual needs.
"And when I am formulated... sprawling on a pin/How should I spit out the butt-ends of my days and ways?"
Rhetorical question. Emphasises the self-consciousness and lack of true identity underneath the persona.
Laforgian symbolist imagery. Post-darwinism. Restriction and dissection. Subversion of Romanticism
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Social routines and imprisonment - endless succession of the facile, meaningless
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Interior world
"Let us go then, you and I"
The permanence of our existential despair.
"When the evening is stretched out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table"
Subversion of Romanticism
and musicality into inertia, atrophy.
Post-Darwinism. :!!:
Rhythmically evokes etherised disorientation into turn of the century.
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The fragmented perceptions of himself and his situation. Sense of cognitive and emotional paralysis for which Prufrock finds a disordered “objective correlative”
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“etherized” suggests the suspended state of Prufrock’s mind which directly opposes “let us go,”
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"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each... I do not think they will sing for me"
Abstract and fantastical, magical representation of mermaids as spirituality and hope that escapes him.
Repetitive inner voices -->
Renewal of romantic enchantment.
Love song subverted - cannot connect with objects of desire --> Instinct of emasculation, insecurity, lack of confidence, inaction.
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"Till human voices wake us, and we drown"
Primordial image of sea
followed by drowning abruptly disrupts romantic vision back to scathing introspection of a hostile and sterile landscape. Dreamlike, lyrical fantasies are shattered by a futile, eternal ennui of modern world.
CONTEXT
Antagonism toward modernity (technological and scientific progress), believing it was simply and illusion which covered a reality of decadence and deterioration
Bergson - we appreciate the world through a perspective drawn from our prevailing contexts which is rationalised in our thoughts and imaginings, our memories, according to accepted patterns of behaviour that society has placed before us.
Decadent Movement
Critiquing polite society - focused on facile, consumerist, trivial, performative
Entropy, decline, and the incorrigibility of human nature
Collective experience of alienation of early 20th Century
Fear of isolation in post-Victorian era
Ontological instability
Existentialism - nature of being
The tension between tradition and progress in Eliot’s poems reflects the Modernist perception of the turn of the century zeitgeist as one characterised by spiritual and moral decay.
Alienation experienced by individuals entrapped by their lack of meaningful communication in the urbanised metropolis dominated by mechanised and automated interactions
MACRO
French Symbolist Movement
Image or symbol as representative of emotion or abstract ideas
Dreams, visions and associative powers of imagination in poetry
Dramatic monologue
Reveal the thoughts, feelings and sensations of the anti-hero, surrounding are interpreted through his sense impressions