View source for Multimedia

==''The Waste Land'' and its derivatives as a palimpsest==
The emotional evocation of The Waste Land, of course, depends largely on the references and allusions it uses.  For those well-versed in the western literary tradition, the connotations of each phrase and expression may be meaningful, but for the uninitiated, the meaning runs the risk of being obscured.  

At first glance, the scattered images of a hundred different perspectives and interpretations drawn from The Waste Land can seem hopeless; some  are so constrained to one-to-one interpretation of symbolisms that they seem hackneyed, others come across as so all-encompassing as to say nothing, and still others tend to be emotionally moving but stubbornly unstated and uninterpreted.  Looking at the collection as a whole, however, it takes on a different sort of life.  Just as The Waste Land contains the limited, often blatantly erroneous perspectives of many different perspectives, personalities, and opinions, melding them all into a sort of loose whole, the derivative work that surrounds it begins slowly to have a similar effect.  

It is here that the idea of the palimpsest comes into play.  The Waste Land, with its collection of fragmented vignettes, easily emulates the written, scraped, and rewritten parchment of a palimpsest.  While the derivative works accessible today are, for the most part, quite whole, they still manage to evoke a similar sense of fragmentation due to the sheer volume of material that renders the reader's grasp extremely limited in comparison.  In today's Web 2.0 culture, oversaturated with information that is, more often than not, written off with a "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read) or a demand for SparkNotes, the overload tends to leave many people with a collection of bits and pieces that comprise an overall sense of the whole.  Rather than following a logical progression, they are superimposed over one another like the various layers of a palimpsest, with only the boldest segments standing out.  As a result, it is not necessarily the primary pieces of each "conversation" that comprise the overall meaning; rather, that which is most impactful ends up playing the primary role in the end.

Considering T.S. Eliot's theory of the objective correlative, this raises the question of whether his intent concerning the emotional impact of the poem even comes through.  To the layman who lacks the background of literary tradition necessary to decipher the layers of The Waste Land, for whom derivative works and multimedia play an even larger role in the interpretation of the poem, this question becomes even more relevant.  

One work that stands out as particularly interpretive is [http://youtu.be/6TCZsJV4V5A The Waste Land (The Burial of the Dead)], by Milad and Isabella.  
<blockquote><videoflash>6TCZsJV4V5A</videoflash></blockquote>
The video claims its own point of view on the poem even in direct defiance to Eliot's intent, saying, "It's all based on short episodes and fragmentations that represent the fall of Europe, despite the fact that T.S. Eliot himself denies this interpretation."  The video continues with a quick, loose breakdown of the first section, "The Burial of the Dead," stating one-to-one correlations between given symbols and their interpretations that are, quite frankly, rather pedantic and reductive.  What follows is a collection of images and clips--at times appropriately surrealist, and at others running rather close to literal depictions of the poem's subject matter.  The overall impression that results is one of restriction, of right and wrong answers with nothing in between.

Elsewhere in the vast expanse of ''The Waste Land'' and its web, works like [http://visualandcriticalstudies.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-an-infographic-by-berny-tan/ A Visual Guide to References in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land], by Berny Tan of the School of Visual Arts, begin to offer a broader overview of the poem in such a way as can be taken like a fragment--in a single glance.  This enormous map lists out a number of different categories of references used in the poem, colour codes them, and proceeds to mark them all out in a series of coloured lines that resembles more closely a DNA assay than a piece of literature.  Quantitative data on a traditionally qualitative, literary work, this guide breaks boundaries and serves as a key, a Rosetta stone, to the everyday reader.  Here, the focus is ''not'' on the interpretation--the authors use the work not to tell the reader what to read, but ''how'' to read it for himself.

Along with the derivative works and spinoffs that comprise the more recent layers of the palimpsest, the option remains to explore such forms of media as played a major or minor role in the inspiration and influences of ''The Waste Land'', to study alternative media archives of Eliot's time, and to pull these older layers into play.  Some have been mostly lost--scraped off by the years and lost between archives.  Others, however, have survived long enough to be digitized and made available for casual or serious study.

<blockquote><videoflash>TpXlPlRqFPA</videoflash></blockquote>
"That Shakespearean Rag" for example, from which are taken the lines "O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag - / It's so elegant / So intelligent," has proven thus far impossible to find.  References are made in other works to the actual song, suggesting its existence at some point in time, but the nearest actual recording that can be found is "That Mysterious Rag" by Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder--supposedly the song off of which "that Shakespeherian Rag" was based.  While we may not be able to verify the actual tune, we can certainly access something of the feel, the abandon, the frivolous contrast to the sterility and bleakness of the poem's landscape.  Such recordings provide some insight into the scene in which the lines appear, especially when paired with the dramatic readings of Fiona Shaw, whose brilliant performance of "My nerves are bad tonight" brings to life the tension between the cheerily domestic housewife and her traumatized, war-veteran partner.  

<blockquote><videoflash>9OK31j2Lcsc</videoflash></blockquote>


==Study Aids & Academic Discussion==

[http://visualandcriticalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/the-waste-land.jpg A Visual Guide to References in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land]
<br>The Visual and Critical Studies program at School of Visual Arts in New York City has produced an extremely useful visualization that lays out the major categories of allusions and references used in ''The Waste Land''.  Be warned--the image is enormous, but it is a good jumping-off point for an in-depth study of the poem and its rich literary roots.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlb38 BBC Radio: The Wasteland and Modernity]
<br>A 28-minute discussion of ''The Waste Land'' and Eliot's view of the modern world.  "With Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London; Fran Brearton, Reader in English at Queen’s University, Belfast; Lawrence Rainey, Professor of English and American Literature at the University of York"

[http://www.touchpress.com/titles/thewasteland/ Touch Press: The Waste Land for iPad]

==Art Galleries==
[http://dodge-gallery.com/cgi-bin/DODGE?s=exhibitions&v=20107231670799676536303116 ''Unreal City'': Dave Cole]
<br>Dave Cole's ''Unreal City'' features a provocative collection of sculptures that evoke a heavy, unspoken commentary on war, industrialization, and urbanization.  Beware: his choice of materials and subject matter is highly thought-provoking and flammable!

[http://www.landwater-research.co.uk/lw.php?pg=sally-waterman "Visualising The Waste Land: Discovering a praxis of adaptation" - Sally Waterman]
<br>Sally Waterman's "Visualising ''The Waste Land'' explores the role of literary texts in self-reflection, replicating with imagery the sort of emotive effect that T.S. Eliot employs in ''The Waste Land''.



==Galleries==
A consolidation of works related to ''The Waste Land'', open to contributions.
* [[Images]]
* [[Audio]]
* [[Video]]


==External Links==
[http://aimee-wang.com/comics.html#wasteland Aimee Wang's The Waste Land Comic]

[http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html Exploring The Waste Land]

[http://www.landwater-research.co.uk/lw.php?pg=sally-waterman Visualising The Waste Land: Discovering a praxis of adaptation]

[http://books.google.com/books?id=SCfHnLwWg2MC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=%22Hamlet+and+His+Problems%22&source=web&ots=cq01aXo2KC&sig=gkcaDTGsWPk-1C-vh1f0MNMGRa4&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false Google Books: The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays]

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/30/eliot-waste-land-multimedia-walk TS Eliot's The Waste Land 2012 - A Multimedia Walk]

[http://throwawayhorse.com/home/2011/04/waste-land/ Martin Rowson’s THE WASTE LAND “SEEN” for iPad]

==See Also==
* [[Objective Correlative]