467 TS Eliot and The Waste Land (with Jed Rasula)
The History of Literature
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The Last Gasp of Neurasthenia
Elliot Pound's wasteland was the last gasp of Neurasthenia, a term invented by an American physician named George Beard in 1869. The poem registers this kind of psychosexual panic and distress combined with the inordinate Harvard learning that he had. It also has to do with the what I would use for this is the Kafka Act because Franz Kafka ended up producing an indelible image of the world being unavoidably weird.
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