Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
T. S. Eliot "The Wasteland
Pop culture influence on society
Pop culture influence on society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Historically speaking the fate of world has always been called into the question. The same is true of commentaries on the state of mankind. T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland" is considered by many to be the greatest poem of all time. During Eliot’s time, the world was beginning to place more value on pop culture than high culture. Gone were the days where most were familiar with the works of the greats. The Wachowski Brothers’ film, The Matrix, deals with similar themes as "The Wasteland" . The science fiction film set in world that has been taken over by machines and centers around the plight of unsuspecting hero, Neo and other who have been freed from the computer simulated reality of The Matrix. Both worlds of “The Wasteland” and The Matrix center around the struggles the inner self faces when modern society no longer reliable for spiritual sustenance. It is the lack of spirituality in modern culture that leaves the masses starved intellectually and out of touch with historical and high culture.
"The Wasteland" begins with The Burial of The Dead. The first part of the poem paints a pictures of place where even spring is unenjoyable. April is a time when, “Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain,” ( 3-4). What should be a time where flowers are in bloom and people are happily thriving is not so. There is an underlying message that people once lived in a better time. There is void which has yet to be filled and a longing for something more. This is a similar scene to the opening of the Matrix. The audience is introduced to Thomas Anderson, who will later become Neo. He is living a seemingly lackluster and unfulfilling life. He is surrounded by the pollution and corruption of the big city and has no emotional ties ...
... middle of paper ...
...to subjects relevant to today, such as religion.Eliot argues that without religion we are all lack direction and more importantly we lack substance in our lives. Without religion, we are superficial and it is due to this that we turn to pop culture. Pop culture is a filler for that which is intellectually rewarding. Eliot recognized this and for this reason he wrote “The Wasteland”. Eliot’s poem made bold statements about what was really happening in the modern world. Whether one argue with Eliot’s positions or not, his work joins the canon of the classic and ironically provides an opportunity for readers to plug into something greater.
Works Cited
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2011.
www.bartleby.com/201/
The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. DVD.
In one of Plato’s works called The Allegory of the Cave he goes over what it means to get higher knowledge and the path you have to take to get to this higher knowledge. Plato also goes over how this higher knowledge or enlightenment will affect people and how they act. He ties this all together through what he calls the cave. Plato tells Glaucon a sort of story about how the cave works and what the people within the cave have to do to get to the enlightenment. A while down the road the Wachowski siblings with the help of Warner Brothers Studios made a movie titled The Matrix. This movie follows the came concept that Plato does in the cave. With saying that the world that Neo (the main character) was living in was in fact not real but a made
The Matrix is a film that uses the five elements of mise-en-scene in order to deliver meaning to the audience and is constantly being seen throughout the entire film. Mise-en-scene is used by filmmakers and directors in order to emphasize what they want the audience to look at as important. The elements of Mise-en-scene are setting, costume and makeup, character and actor, lighting and color, and composition.
The Matrix is a 1999 action film, noted for its science fiction and special effects, about the life of an individual who has been chosen to discover the truth of the world he lived in and eventually save all humanity from the enslavement of their minds in the Matrix. The story begins with an average computer programmer, named Thomas Anderson, who begins to notice strange occurrences as he dabbles in deeper into the secretive life of computer hacking and illegal software encryption through the nickname ‘Neo’. He is tracked down by another hacker, Trinity, and warns him of the dangers that would occur if he chose to remain in his current life. After Thomas realizes that he was being hunted down by sinister agents, he agrees to follow the path
The movie "Matrix" is drawn from an image created almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the greek philosopher, Plato in his work, ''Allegory of the Cave''.The Matrix is a 1999 American-Australian film written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Plato, the creator of the Allegory of the Cave was a famous philosopher who was taught by the father of philosophy Socrates. Plato was explaining the perciption of reality from others views to his disciple Aristotle. The Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave share a simmilar relationship where both views the perciption of reality, but the Matrix is a revised modern perciption of the cave. In this comparison essay I am going to explain the similarities and deifferences that the Matrix and The Allegory of the Cave shares.In the Matrix, the main character,Neo,is trapped in a false reality created by AI (artificial intelligence), where as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave a prisoner is able to grasp the reality of the cave and the real life. One can see many similarities and differences in the film and the allegory. The most important similarity was between the film and the Allegory is the perception of reality.Another simmilarity that the movie Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave shares is that both Neo and the Freed man are prisoners to a system. The most important difference was that Neo never actually lived and experienced anything, but the freed man actually lived and experinced life.
...The Matrix” and Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” almost gives the idea that the movies writers may have had a lot of influence from Plato’s allegory. The creation of this movie gives and futuristic prospective of “The Allegory of the Cave” letting the people who have seen the movie think about reality and the truth. In conclusion, Plato’s story of the cave brings up many philosophical points and most significantly, addresses the topic of society’s role in our lives. On some level, we are all influenced by the thoughts and actions of everyone else, but at the same time, we as humans have the ability to question, make our own conclusions, and finally make our own choices.
In the film The Matrix (1999) in the scene “The Two Pills” help characters and relationships are developed and continuation of the films narrative through various components of cinematography and mise-en-scène. Most notable in The Matrix is the use of costuming, sound effects, props, setting and camera movement. Through the use of these techniques the audience becomes more involved in the narrative as Neo meets Morpheus for the first time and is given the opportunity to learn the secrets of the matrix.
The Waste Land is concerned with the 'disillusionment of a generation'. The poem was written in the early 1920's, a time of abject poverty, heightening unemployment and much devastation unresolved from the end of WW1 in 1918. Despite this, or because of it, people made a conscientious effort to enjoy themselves. In doing so they lost their direction, their beliefs and their individuality. They were victims of the class system which maintained a system of privilege, snobbery and distrust. Advances in machinery brought new products onto the market, like cars, but the people were so disillusioned with the social turmoil caused by four years of war, that even the glamour of new possessions could not fill the spiritual and emotional void left by the war. The consciousness of a nation had been battered into submission by the horrors of the first world war that people now were living a shell of what was once life. People went through the motions of life but there was no feeling just a mechanical existence. This kind of surface existence, the inability to see beyond the obvious, is portrayed throughout the Wasteland. The Wasteland is a soulless picture of a world deprived of fertility. Everything has become sterile in this barren landscape, people have nowhere left to look but to the outer shell because the inside is emotionally dead. As a result, the characters of The Wasteland are superficial in every sense of the word. Some are obsessed with appearance. Others are so far detached from the things that make life more than just breathing and looking good, that they perpetuate the destructive cycle that is slowly killing them and their world. They exist without hope, faith and spiritual enlightenme...
In interpreting the respected poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men”, the validity of Eliot’s statement will be thoroughly examined.
T. S. Eliot in the twentieth-century wrote what is today widely-regarded as one of the most important texts of modernist poems, “The Waste Land.” This poem evaluates many aspects of ancient and contemporary culture and customs, and how the contemporary culture has degraded into a wasteland. In “The Waste Land,” Eliot conjures, through allusions to multiple religions and works of literature in five separate sections, a fragmented and seemingly disjointed poem. Eliot repeatedly alludes to western and eastern cultural foundation blocks to illustrate the cultural degradation prevalent in the modern era of England. One specific eastern example is brought up in the third section of the poem, which T.S. Eliot names “Fire Sermon,” an allusion to Buddha's sermon that preaches the path to ridding one’s self of suffering.
Death is the primary theme in TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. Written just four years after the conclusion of World War I, The Wasteland mirrors the despair felt by much of the post-war generation. The poem begins with a section titled "Burial of the Dead." In this section Eliot deems April "the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." With these lines, Eliot suggests that springtime’s regeneration of life only causes people to remember what was lost in the past. Eliot again addresses death in the very next stanza:
The Matrix is a narrative film by The Wachowski Brothers ,in 1999 is the groundbreaking visual effects film that tells the story of Neo, the hacker turned the One, in this a hero’s story. It is told in a chronological order from Neo’s point of view from the moment he wakes up to the moment he realizes that he is the One and the power it grants him. The film is best known for it use of bullet time and it commentary on perspective of our world and how real is it truly.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a complex and fragmented poem that underwent major revisions before it was published in 1922. The published version we see and read today is considerably shorter in comparison to what Eliot had originally written. According to James Torrens’s article “The Hidden Years o f the Waste Land Manuscript,” Eliot had mailed “54 pages of The Waste Land, including the unused parts” to John Quinn, a “corporation lawyer in New York City,” which had shortly disappeared after Quinn’s death in July of 1924 (Cuddy 60). Eliot’s “lost” pages were not uncovered until the early 1950s (Ford). In 1971, a facsimile of the original drafts of “The Waste Land,” edited by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, was published and revealed how much
His mental state is confirmed when he remarks that his “nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking?” (110) Still recuperating from overwhelming stress and anxiety, Eliot successfully manages to express his weaknesses through his poetry. Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot mentions an “unreal city,” perhaps parallel to his own move to London. A crowd is described as flowing “over the
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
Reality is the blurred truth as shown by the Matrix by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. Both pieces depict the theme - reality versus truth. The Wachowskis set the protagonist, Neo, in a simulated reality called “The Matrix”. Neo as the name suggests, represents “New” as he is the “chosen one” to defeat the sentinels. Similarly, Sophie’s name means “wise” or “wisdom” as she is also chosen to be exposed to the truth. Symbolism is an integral factor behind the significant message the movie and book conveys: we are living deep in the rabbit’s fur. Neo and Sophie encountered the choice to see the ugly truth through objects presented to them. In Neo’s case, he was given an option to choose the red pill (truth) or blue