Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar

Shudong Chen

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781793631664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar discusses how Four Quartets should be explored afresh with a prosodic-philosophically sustained interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary approach in ways as the often overlooked pivotal image of the Chinese jar so indicates in the great sequence; the pivotal image suggests the subtle but vital elixir from both "The 'shores of Asia and the Edgware Road' [which] are brought together as they had been brought together to The Waste Land." With a steady focus on the function words-mediated and phonemes-facilitated, and "autochthonously" void-suggesting verbal transformation, the book shows how the verbal transformation, especially of the cases with "parts of speech" in the live context, makes Four Quartets truly a "rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty"; it demonstrates how the meaningful poetic beauty culminates in a quintessential state or being of poetry not merely being "poetic" particularly in terms of its prosodically sustained philosophical tenets, which are often so serendipitously transformed into "virtuoso mastery of verbal music." As genuine poetry, the great sequence flows freely from inside out at once in accordance with and in spirt of any given rhythmical form or rhyming pattern.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Geology of Narrative Cultures: Still Motion, Matrix of Void of the Chinese Jar, and Hidden Message of Function Words: Smooth Ground of Syntactic Culture and Rough Terrain of The Real
• 2 “Burnt Norton”: Timely Timeless Time in Motionless Motion Captured in Worded World
• 3 “East Coker”: Knowing Time as Stranded on Land but Enlivened in Words
• 4 “The Dry Salvages”: Knowing Oneself through Function Words-Mediated Oceanic View of Time
• 5 “Little Gidding”: Reconciliation of the Irreconcilable in the Mode of “a Chinese Jar” through Timely Timeless Time in Motionless Motion
• 6 Conclusion: Interdisciplinary References that Illuminate from within and across Cultures
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author