Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
English
Date of Award
5-2022
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
D. Michael Jones
Committee Members
Daniel Westover, Matthew Holtmeier
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are corrupted by capitalism to diminish the human body into a interchangeable, unhuman cog; fully understood as Bataille’s “thing.” The anti-elegy, distorted by capitalism, creates the possibilities necessary for Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” which protests humanity’s objectification under capitalism while creating the ultimate anti-elegy for the anti-elegy.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Bennett, K. Matthew, "A Lesson in Mourning: The Evolution of the English Anti-Elegy" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 4042. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/4042
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
Included in
Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, European History Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Modern Literature Commons