T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Frightening Visions of the Destiny of Mankind

الملخص

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) presents a bleak and apocalyptic vision of the post-WW1 world, which witnesses social, moral, and even religious decay and, thus, symbolically becomes a waste and sterile land. This paper examines Eliot’s visions of the destiny of mankind through Stephen Cook’s conception of apocalyptic prophecy and Edouard Glissant’s conception of chaos to demonstrate that the world is still in a state of continuous collapse. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, perfectly captures the dystopian future that Eliot foreshadowed a century ago