"The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock"

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses how literary modernism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is considered to have emerged as a radical break with tradition in the field of both artistic production and criticism. The paper examines how the break with tradition presupposed, among other things, the novelty of ideas and technique, new artistic means of creation and a new perspective on authorship. The paper examines the poem "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock", concluding that the main theme of the poem is the discrepancy between modernism and the primitive, between daily life and the dream world, all these being dualities, not oppositions, and being at the very core of artistic creation, as part of human experience as such.

From the Paper:

"The modern artist's search for novelty is thus not a break with tradition in itself, there are no new emotions to be found, only new means of expression, new rhetorical devices, and especially the inclusion of common or " low " things, next to the "high" ones, to the extent that all kinds of experience can be considered literary experience. These features just mentioned are also among the most striking particularities of Eliot's poetry."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance & the "Fin de Siecle" : Popular Fiction & British Culture. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2000
• Eliot, Thomas Stearns The Oxford Book of Verse, New York: Bartleby, 1999
• Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing & Reactionary Politics.Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2001
• Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945 : Image to Apocalypse.Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
• Lamos, Colleen. Deviant Modernism : Sexual & Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce & Marcel Proust.Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1999

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