TY - JOUR KW - poésie / poetry AU - Mara de Gennaro BT - Comparative Literature Studies IS - 3 LA - anglais / English N1 -

The comparison of T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Wasteland (1922) with Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) leads the author of this very perceptive article to insights that enhance understanding of each work. Beneath the vast differences between the situations of each poet, she finds a common thread in the two works: both destabilize traditional modes of writing via a discourse of “indirection and comparatism.” She suggests that these features are rooted in postcolonial and feminist efforts to reimagine the literal meaning of the poet’s words. In this view Césaire appears as a “prodigious transitional figure in the evolution of modernist transnationalism.” She argues that by reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and then The Wasteland, one can discern both men as “intercultural poets who call us to imagine a broken but potentially human culture in which a new poetry is needed to repair the poet’s community, and thereby repair the human itself.” TH

PY - 2015 T2 - Comparative Literature Studies TI - A Return to The Waste Land after Césaire's Cahier VL - 52 ER -