Futurism and Technology in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Anwesha Ghosh College

Scholars have already established how T.S. Eliot uses the various characteristics of his contemporary artistic movements of Futurism, Cubism, and Surrealism in The Waste Land as well as how he takes a cue from technology to the frame the sentences in the poem. Jacob Korg argues that the fragmentary narratives of the poem are very similar to the Futurist and the Cubist paintings which brought together the “successive states of a model” simultaneously (457). Juan Antonio Suárez meticulously analyses the form of The Waste Land to argue that Eliot himself is like a “mad disc-jockey who delights in creating mosaics of sound and language” (758), which accounts for the incomplete sentences in the poem. But, these articles have taken into consideration only the form of the poem to establish the influence of Futurism on it. This paper would argue how Eliot not only weaves Futurism into the content of The Waste Land (in addition to its form) but also subverts one of the major claims of Futurism. This essay would also argue about the dual aspect of technology, brought in by the Second Industrial Revolution, in women’s lives— both as a disaster and as an agency-giver. Due to the finite scope of this paper, only the episode of the typist...