Abstract

This research-creation thesis consists of a long conceptual poem in the form of a knitting pattern and an accompanying essay. The poem, “The Waste Land”, is a translation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into a knitting pattern. The pattern was made by scanning the poem and translating the stressed beats of the poem into knit stitches and the unstressed beats into purl stitches. The essay goes on to further explain the process of creating the pattern, discussing the nature of language and translation, as well as the ideology behind the project.
Bebenek’s long poem is a critique of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, a notoriously exclusory poem, upheld within the English literary canon. Bebenek argues against the notion of the lone genius artist, engaging with Eliot’s complex argument within his essay “Tradition and The Individual Talent”. Bebenek argues instead for collaboration within the arts as a way of dismantling patriarchal dominance within the English literary canon. Engaging with Feminist textile arts as a model for collective creation, Bebenek seeks to complicate the divide between arts and crafts, the artist and the artisan, originality and reproduction.