Duets and Deadness

Like many who regularly teach The Waste Land, I find myself struggling to formulate classes that not only encourage collaboration but thematize it, by working through the various kinds of interactivity performed by the text itself. It is a deeply collaborative poem in every respect, down to its very composition. And the interactive quality of the poem—its intertextual borrowings across both time and space, theatrical exchanges of voices in public houses, operatic interjections of ThamesSisters—saturates its language and form. All of these lively exchanges notwithstanding, I often find it a struggle to talk about the multiple aural presences of the poem without watching them land with “dead sound” right in front of me.