The Waste Land: Hypertext, Collage and the Nodes of Meaning.

I am really tired now but I have started my next piece of work. Two essays; the first of which is:

The Waste Land: Hypertext, Collage and the Nodes of Meaning.

The Waste Land is a collaborative work created by T.S. Eliot who wrote the text/s and Ezra Pound who edited and collated the various manuscripts together to create the poem first published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s Ulysses. The text itself is comprised of a variety of language discourses ranging from interiorized monologue and intimate daily speech to journalism, mythology and a World War One marching song. These are collaged together around themes related to mortality and the possibilities of death/life in/after life/death. In this essay I wish to explore the issues surrounding the dispersive prose narrative of The Waste Land in regard to Pound’s concept of language nodes and its relevance to the recent adaptation of the authoritative text as two online hypertext publications of the work. Through all of these points runs the thread of what Marjorie Perloff describes as “metonymic sequences in which the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” (Perloff 1981: 180).

No rest for the wicked.........