F26-28 From Literary Criticism to Visionary Poetry: Jessie Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”
Zoom | Available (Membership Required)
This Zoom course will be recorded.
In a careful and inspired application of the mythic structures of reality established by J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough to the reading of medieval romance, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) explores the narrative patterns of sacrifice and renewal at the nexus of medieval consciousness and poetic expression. Weston exposes the healing relevance of Anfortas, a.k.a The Fisher King, Perceval, the Grail Maiden, the Holy Grail, and the Waste Land itself, reclaiming the seemingly remote realities of the Middle Ages for the twentieth century. Two years later, T. S. Eliot found his objective correlative for the post-World War I malaise of the nineteen twenties among Weston’s analyses of the mythic structures of Arthurian Romance. Their works demonstrate a startling, perhaps unexpected, symbiosis between critical theory and poetic inspiration.
Joel Feimer PhD
Joel N. Feimer PhD taught undergraduate and graduate level English Literature and Composition at Mercy College in New York from 1967 to 2010. He earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York in 1983. He has published several essays on topics in Medieval and Modern Literature and co-edited a text for composition with his former colleague at Mercy College, Howard Canaan. He began teaching for ILR in the spring of 2015 and has served as President on its Board of Directors.