Saying The Waste Land (and meaning it)

Prof. Julian Lamb
Senior Lecturer, School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong Australia

***All are welcome***

Abstract:
In this brief talk I want to address an anomaly. Many readers of The Waste Land are deeply affected by the poem, but often disclaim: “I don’t know what it means.” Though this disclaimer is intended to express a degree of humility before so intimidating a work, it unwittingly suggests that knowing what a work means might not be very important. I want to follow this lead by posing the question: “How does The Waste Land mean?” This shift from “what” to “how” not only allows us to reconstrue the poem as a producer of meaning, but sheds different light on what we think it is for a poem to mean something. This “how” question is also consonant with my own experience of the poem which has not been as an academic, but a performer.

Bio:
Julian Lamb received his PhD from Cambridge University. He has published a monograph on early modern pedagogy, and his articles on Shakespeare, early modern linguistics, and English Renaissance poetry have appeared in journals such as English Literary Renaissance and Shakespeare Quarterly. Until 2021, Lamb taught in the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong Australia.