The ragged claws of crisis: Reading ‘Prufrock’ in Detroit
Steven, M
Date: 4 September 2017
Article
Journal
Textual Practice
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Why might a B-grade horror film in 2015 stage a performative reading of
T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’? That is precisely what we
encounter during It Follows, when a classroom recitation of the well-known
poem frames an encounter between the film’s heroine and a spectral force of
bodily destruction. This essay ...
Why might a B-grade horror film in 2015 stage a performative reading of
T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’? That is precisely what we
encounter during It Follows, when a classroom recitation of the well-known
poem frames an encounter between the film’s heroine and a spectral force of
bodily destruction. This essay begins with an account of that scene before
describing how the film uses its historical setting, in Detroit Michigan, to forge
an allegorical tale about life during an economic crisis. The essay then takes
that film as a critical lens for re-reading the poem rehearsed therein. It does
so in order to see if we can read the film’s allegorical tale of economic crisis
back into Eliot’s poem, and to thereby approach the poem’s relatively
uncontroversial claim to modernism as a textual imprint of the crisis-prone
system to which it belongs. It argues that by coupling the poem and the film,
released exactly one century apart, we will gain new insights into the deeper
tectonics of modernism and specifically of modernist literary horror.
English
Collections of Former Colleges
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