Analyzing Social Activism and Literature Dissertation or Thesis Complete

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gender and how the characteristic is addressed within the precincts of play, poem, or short story. Further, a comparison of literary elements will be made, in the play, poem, or short story.

Gender and how it is handled in the confines of short story, play, or poem.

Poem -- Thomas Stearns Eliot's The Waste Land

A careful reading of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land depicts the author's profound anticipation of an important collection of concepts, considered as post-modernism for a major part of the second half of the 20th century. While it is well-understood that the poem by Eliot comprises of a portrayal of theatrical voices, critics are yet to fully understand the fact that a foundational portion of this drama is presentation of gender. Certainly, Eliot, who is, at times, openly positioned as an embodiment of male sexual/poetic hierarchy, is a pioneering 20th-century figure who depicted what was later termed by Judith Butler as the means by which the precise perception of what's possible within gendered life is prevented by certain violent and habitual suppositions (GT, viii). For demonstrating how Eliot reveals such structures of self, as socially created in discourse and as performances, this paper will review three important emotional scenes contained within Eliot's poem, from the episode of the "Hyacinth girl" (35-42); the initial conversation depicted in the "A Game of Chess" section (111-38); and "What the Thunder Said" section's silent admission to a friend (402-23). The fact that all three scenes portray strikingly different social situations and gender performances, wherein performance expectations are clearly, and at times traumatically imposed, is not an insignificant fact (Pondrom, 2005).

Marie is the first individual introduced into the poem, in its first section, titled 'The Burial of the Dead'. Her name indicates that she is the archetypical prelapsarian female; she is the antithesis to another archetypal female -- the prostitute introduced later on in the course of the poem. While the powerful sledging image signifies sexuality, rather than being engaged in sexual activity, Marie engages in reading late into the night (l. 18).

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Noticeably, the poem has no pronoun to indicate the speaker's gender, whether female or male. While this occurrence is omnipresent in The Waste Land, the typical assumption of readers is that the narrator is male; meanwhile, the unmistakably gendered characters within the poem (with the exception of Tiresias) are all female. This assumption of readers is due to the fact that the speaker behaves in a way that is perceived to be typical male behavior. This is one strong example of Judith Butler's gender performativity: gender is only assigned to the narrator in the reader's discourse with text. The Hyacinth girl makes an appearance following a passage awash with fragmented pictures of desolation (l. 19-34).

Fertility and the hyacinth are echoed in the following lines (71-2): 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / has it begun to sprout?' as well. It is suggested that, since the flower originates from the body of a male, Eliot's hyacinth girl isn't female, but male, or androgynous at the very least, thereby suggesting a homoerotic interpretation of this passage. The implicit sexual failure has scarcely any room for doubts regarding the narrator's gender; impotence has initially been linked to males. The feeling of disconnectedness is further emphasized by Wagner's quote 'Oed' und leer das Meer' in the end. Gender role attribution is simplified by the implicit traditional roles. The act is initiated by the male narrator through the presentation of flowers, while the female character is given secondary status by being referred to as 'girl' (Pondrom, 2005, pp. 429-430).

Literary Elements in the Short Story, Play, Or Poem

Poem --Amy Lowell's September, 1918

Imagery -- Imagery implies sense experience's representation….....

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