Enchantment, Disenchantment, War, Literature

Abstract

This essay employs the notions of enchantment and disenchantment to develop a theory of literature and violence across the twentieth century. War and violence were imagined either as generative, providing the symbolic core for cultural self-definition, or as entirely unredeemable, as pointless attacks on human flesh. A wide-ranging language is provided for elucidating the relation of literature to war and violence, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is considered as an example of the key motifs traversing and defining this history. The poem demonstrates that literary modernism, for all its tendency to encode, rescript, and miscegenate, was fully and intricately engaged with the polarization between transformative and useless violence.