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Copyright

Aditya Ghosh; Ujjwal Jana;

Published On

2024-11-06

Page Range

pp. 191–208

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

10. Literary masterpiece as a literary bank

A digital representation of intertextual references in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Chapter of: Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India(pp. 191–208)
This chapter attempts to model a digital representation of all the intertextual references alluded to in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It encompasses the references Eliot incorporated into this masterpiece, from Classical and Biblical texts to his contemporary literary texts, followed by an inventory of post-Waste Land texts which borrowed from the text in question. This work produced by Eliot throws any reader or scholar into a labyrinth of intertextuality and literary allusions, the sheer magnitude of which can potentially confuse as the range of the references reaches far and wide. There is a scholarly dispute about the changing paradigm of critical research works under the veneer of digital technology, as many are apprehensive about losing epistemological and ontological aspects of critical research work in the field of humanities under the sustained pressure of employing a digital medium.1 But, having the benefit of an archival digital repository and its capability to quickly access multiple texts from various resources corroborates the view that technology can facilitate the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the field of humanities. The main objective of this research is to create a repository where all the intertextual references of Eliot’s poem The Waste Land could be stored. This chapter will employ three different steps to demonstrate different sources of references and allusions that were used in the production of The Waste Land.

Contributors

Aditya Ghosh

(author)
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts at ICFAI University, Tripura

Dr Aditya Ghosh is an Assistant Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts, ICFAI University, Tripura. His areas of interest are Indian writing in English, British Literature, Literary Theory, English Language Teaching, Dalit Literature and Digital Humanities. He was part of the Indian team of the MHRD, Ministry of Education, Government of India-sponsored SPARC (Scheme for the Promotion of Research Collaboration)-funded research project collaborating with Western Sydney University, Australia in 2019–2021.

Ujjwal Jana

(author)
Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts at University of Delhi
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5940-8201

Dr Ujjwal Jana is Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Professor Jana’s areas of academic and research interest include Digital Humanities, Translation Studies, Disability Studies and Literary Studies with interdisciplinary orientation. Professor Jana was a Fulbright Scholar in Indiana University, Bloomington, USA in 2007–2008. He was a visiting faculty member in the Departments of English, Leipzig University, Germany and University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 2014 and 2017 respectively. He received Hungarian State scholarship awards in the academic year 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 funded by the Tempus Foundation of the Government of Hungary to carry out collaborative research projects. He was the Indian Principal Investigator of the SPARC (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) sponsored International collaborative Project (2019–2023) on “Digital Humanities in the Indian Rim” in collaboration with Western Sydney University, Australia, funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. Professor Jana’s Bengali translation of Amit Chaudhuri’s Sahitya-Akademi-Award-winning English novel, A New World (2000) by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, was published in 2021. Presently he is the Indian Principal Investigator of another SPARC-sponsored International Project (2023–2025) on “Indian-European entanglements: exploring trans-cultural relationships through Digital Humanities”, to collaborate with Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. Ghent University, Belgium funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India. He is currently carrying out a research project funded by the Indian Council of Historical Research, India on the 19th-century poet saint of Odisha, Bhima Bhoi, during 2024–2026. Professor Jana has edited an anthology on Digital Culture in Humanities: Contemporary Trends published by a Delhi-based publishing house in January 2023.