| This dissertation examines the problem of universality in literary studies and the notion of the "universal" text. In the past, as W. K. Wimsatt's "The Concrete Universal" and Michael G. Cooke's Acts of Inclusion suggest, the problem of universality has been defined both as one of definition and one of style and structure. Like my predecessors, I am also concerned with the question "what does the term universality mean when applied to a literary text?" and I am interested in those elements of style and structure that encourage readers to claim the universality of a particular text. However, more importantly, I wish to redefine the problem of universality. In particular, I wish to suggest that the problem of universality is a problem of interpretation--a problem that results from the relationship between readers, who claim the universality of literary texts, and the text itself.;Thus, to illustrate that the problem of universality is one of interpretation and to suggest the implications of this point, I offer a section by section analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In each of the study's five chapters, I describe those elements of style and structure that encourage readers to claim that The Waste Land is the universal or what I define, for the sake of convenience, as the all-inclusive poem.;In addition to analyzing elements of style and structure that encourage readers to claim the universality of The Waste Land (i.e., a broken structure and hollow linguistic style, details that suggest human types or container-like images of persons, allusion, the trope of apostrophe, the copulativeless catalogue, and a rhetoric of generalization that Elisabeth Schneider terms "the concrete universal") this dissertation challenges the claim to universality that has been made on behalf of literary texts and, in particular, on behalf of The Waste Land. To accomplish this second goal, I point out that The Waste Land, like all literary texts, is limited and limiting because it maintains a particular ideology or world view. Thus, as Pierre Macherey suggests, the text creates necessary silences; it implies, in other words, acts of exclusion. In particular, I argue that The Waste Land pronounces its own parochialism or limitations because it celebrates absence and, in effect, undermines and denies the notion of presence.;Finally, I conclude that the problem of universality, a problem of interpretation, is accurately described with the term the paradox of universality. By this I mean to suggest that on the one hand the term universality has appeared and continues to appear in analyses of literary texts. In other words, writers such as Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Joseph Chiari, W. Jackson Bate, and Michael G. Cooke use the category universality, a category suggested by Aristotle's Poetics, to describe the margins of a text. And yet, paradoxically, because each and every text is bound by a particular ideology, no text, in fact, is universal.;I note that the problem of universality, one which I finally refer to as the paradox of universality, is suggested by the analyses of texts such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the plays of Shakespeare, Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Joyce's Ulysses, among others. However, I argue that this problem takes on particular significance during the modern period. This is the case because at this time writers, confronting the personal, social, and political upheaval that resulted from the crisis of first one and then a second world war, were motivated by a wish to use literature not only to "make it new" but also to "make it whole."... |
