Imposing Order to See the Disorder: Student Depression and T.S. Eliot ’s The Waste Land: A (Mis)reading/Diagnosis

AbstractSometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student ’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’sThe Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is areflection upon the processes oforder anddisorder located in a diagnosis of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis.
Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research