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Differences |
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Both call for a break with
the past; see conventions of previous generation of writers as stifling
(Woolf rebels against the "realism" of novelists such as Forsythe, Galsworthy
etc.; Eliot rebels against emotionality of Romantics and Victorians)
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Both see Milton as a blocking
figure
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For both, part of that break
with the past is the exploration of a new subject-matter—one which is closer
to the bones, more frank, more gritty, less “sublime” more personal.
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Have different quarrels with
Milton: VW quarrels with his patriarchical views and his misogyny; TSE
quarrels with his politicis and negative impact on poetry
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Both are concerned with splits
in consciousness:
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for Eliot it is the split between
thinking and feeling and the overemphsis on feeling and originality characteristic
of romanticism. For Woolf the split is more gendered, and it is between
two different kinds of thinking, one of which is intuitive, flexible, subjective,
and private and the other which is rational, rigid, and publically masquarades
as objective truth.
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Both see the importance of
"tradition," and both see tradition as a kind of whole on which the new
artist draws.
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Interesting possible comparison
betwwen Woolf's "web" and Eliot's tradition
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Both see the need for an active
relationship to tradition, critiquing it, selcting from it
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Both seem to have a gendered
version of tradition; Eliot doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of
women writers; Woolf says a woman writnig thinks back through her mothers.
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Woolf rebls against traditional
male models of power and success based on competition
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Eliot is only rebelling aginst
predecessors (such as the Romantics) whom he disapproves of politically
and poetically.
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Woolf feels that women writers
don't have enough of a tradition behind them; ths is part of what
has historically crippled them.
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Eliot feels the artist must
create a new sense of their own special tradition
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Elito stresses how the new
changes the old; woolf stress how the old has limited the new
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Woolf feels that some asccomplishments
of women have been totally lost; Eliot feels that some authors haven't
been appreciated enough.
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• Both see the central
task of the writer as capturing and communicating the nuances of human
emotion
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Both also think that the personal
emotion, the personality needs to be absent in the final work of art.
They share the modernist ideal ofimpersonality, but both similarly are
unable to fully achieve it in their art.
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Both experience a tension between
impersonality and political belief
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Both of them are profoundly
pissed off at the opposite gender.
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Both have pretty powerful defense
mechanisms
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For Woolf what gets in the
way of impersonality is anger
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For Eliot what gets in the
way of impersonality is his vulnerability, maybe anger as well, particularly
anger at women.
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For Eliot, the big defense
mechanism is his elitism
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For Woolf it is her charm.
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• Eliot wrote for an exclusive,
elite audience; Woolf’s criticism was published in TLS, the New Republic—newspapers
and journals with many times larger circulation—and she wrote for the “common
reader” |
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