Professor David Peimer
T.S. Eliot: Visionary Poetry, Ordinary Prejudices
Summary
T.S. Eliot was one of the truly great poets of the 20th century. He was a modernist, a visionary who sensed the pressures of his disillusioned age. He also had his prejudices including the usual stereotypes of Jewish people. We will look at his poetry and vision, in all the complexity of being a man of his time and ask: how does his poetry resonate in our darkening times today?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
No, as I mentioned, he tried to enlist but was not allowed in. But he did try, once the Americans came into the war.
I think it’s a great question, Sandra. I think that he saw traditionally individual talent that essay where he talks about the classical, the tradition of the great penon of English literature. But how the individual, the tradition and the individual talent, the individual talent must take that, absorb it and take it further or make something new from that, Cannot write pretending a naivety about past literature, but take it, be imbued within deep inside it and take it much further. I think it was that paradoxical link.
That’s a great question. I mean, there’s so many possible. We can only speculate. We can only speculate, was it Christianity? Was it the Christ killing? Was it money? The stereotype of money and user was the stereotype. Oh, there’s so many possibilities.