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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:etd-5567 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Creators | Bennett, K. Matthew |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright by the authors. |
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