Stagnation,Division And Depreciation

As T.S.Eliot’s first well-known poem,“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”embodies T.S.Eliot’s early poetics and modernity.Literary scholars at home and abroad have studied this poem from the perspectives of its implied meaning,characters,artistic features and cognitive poetics,and so on,but it still needs more exploration on T.S.Eliot’s early thoughts.What the most important is that there hasn’t the relative study on Nietzschean tragic spirit and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” to explore the decline of tragic spirit,T.S.Eliot’s aesthetic views on tragedy and his reflections on modern existence in this poem,and that’s the reason why this thesis topic is chosen.As the philosophical signified of modern tragedy,Nietzschean tragic spirit emphasizes the modern cultural significance directed by its artistic aesthetic interpretation on life value and its ontological criticism on modern scientific culture.This modern interpretation of the stagnation,division,and depreciation of Nietzschean tragic spirit in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” is not only a degraded description of the grand narration and the life sublime of classical tragedy but also the modern inheritance and aesthetic transformation of the tragic spirit set against the elimination of the highest value,the overflow of scientism and the disappearance of mythological culture.In this sense,Nietzschean tragic spirit and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” share the same existential value and cultural significance,and both strive to complete the aesthetic transformation of tragic spirit without moral confinement to overcome the barbarism and hollowness in modern culture,which provides solid logical support for this study.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,the main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter mainly analyses the first representation of the decline of tragic spirit: the stagnation of Dionysiac Will.By combination with Nietzsche’s anti-traditional cognition of the ancient Greeks proposing in The Birth of Tragedy,the first chapter studies Prufrock’s stagnation of Dionysiac Will and finds that Prufrock tries to use the time for hesitation as Buffer Zone to release inner pain and fulfill his self-acceptance and self-unity,which is similar with ancient Greeks’ way to avoid looking into the existential abyss without blinking by Apolline images.The second chapter mainly discusses the second representation of the decline of the tragic spirit: self-division.This chapter finds that Prufrock is so self-divided between his subject and his object that he is self-degraded and loses his positivity to affirm his life in the failure of a brotherly bond.The third chapter mainly discusses the third representation of the decline of the tragic spirit: self-depreciation of metaphysical solace.The depreciation of metaphysical solace refers to the lacking of the highest value and meaning anxiety for a mediocre existence.Prufrock,as T.S.Eliot’s agent,confesses epochal questions,which are the same with the Socratic sin accused by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy: omnipotent knowledge and scientific worldview.It replaces Dionysiac intoxication with rational logic and results in the decline of ancient tragedy thereafter and the prominence of intellectual crisis.At last,this chapter puts forward that Prufrock’s tragedy shows Eliot’s anxiety of influence and is the blending transformation of personal tragedy and social tragedy.This thesis founds that this kind of new tragic writing is the typical production of early modern culture,bestows modern tragedy new experience,and illustrates the demonstration of Nietzschean tragic spirit in modern time.As a poet,Eliot takes the“love song” as a “tragic song”,claiming his artistic appeal for the modern world,which is the aesthetic explanation for world and life and the impotence of Eliot’s poetic ideal.Meanwhile,the depreciation of Nietzschean tragic spirit reflects the rising of the desperate comic spirit and modern rebirth of humanism,thus this constructs the distinctive poetic paradigm of modern tragedy.