It’s All About Economics –The Urban Ecology in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal a social-economic pattern within T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, aModernistic post-apocalyptic poem, in which the inner self of the modern urbanite is fragmented bythe post-war reality of the beginning of the last century. The main space in which the human beingdwells is the city, a culturally constructed place of conflicting psychological, social, economic andnatural energies. The urbanite’s interior conflict is objectified toward the social otherness and,further, over the natural other, in this way, a hierarchy of power between the social human and thenatural environment having been established. This collision between incompatible and unnaturalagencies is mediated by the transformation of nature in urban space through means of economicand cultural production and consumption. The sterile land represents the direct aftermath of theover-exploited, over-consumed and over(re)produced nature, which has become a social waste.

Keywords

• The Waste Land
• oikos
• city
• social ecology
• production of space