Less love and more feeling: radical personality in T. S. Eliot’s "Impersonal theory of art"
- Jean-Michel Ganteau (coord.)
- Christine Reynier (coord.)
Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
ISBN: 978-2-84269-665-8, 978-2-36781-411-7
Year of publication: 2005
Pages: 109-117
Type: Book Chapter
Abstract
T. S. Eliot’s literary and critical output in the 1910s and 1920s is crucially preoccupied with the relation between individuation and universal meaning, that is, with the problem of the isolated ego. It may be understood that Eliot addresses the problem of the isolated ego by developing a theory of literary art which establishes the relationship between the author and the work as one where the former ‘forgets her self.’ This has been the traditional interpretation of Eliot’s ‘impersonal theory of art,’ where personality stands for self. I would like to argue that this is a potentially misleading interpretation of his puzzling theory, given that it implies that impersonality equates with not-self. Rather Eliot struggles to define individual experience through impersonality as a way of defining the right kind of self which can thus properly overcome its solitude.