Abstract

My thesis project, titled “The Wasted Land,” primarily takes aim at T. S. Eliot’s seminal work, “The Waste Land.” While Eliot’s project was to alert readers to decay, both cultural and literal in terms of the cityscape, my project will explore the Montreal bar and rave scene in all its decadence and delirium.
The stories themselves, primarily narrated in the first person, will follow two narrators through their katabacal journeys into the bowels of Montreal and into the West of Canada. There are no ancestors there, no guides. The stories will take place over one
summer, beginning in April and ending in August. The first narrator, Bea, will plunge into a world where cannibalism of women is most obvious: the sex industry. While Eliot moves East towards religion, J’s stories will backpedal in the opposite direction, the West
(moving to Calgary), following a tradition of Romantic poetry where Nature may be the remedy to the city life and, more broadly,
existence in the hyper-real 21st century. Of course, both options as solutions are equally tenuous.
Voice is a key component for my thesis project. Moreover, while Eliot’s work is poetry, the project will take an interest in a prose that is deliberated crafted, borrowing components from poetics such as cadence, alliteration, and metering. The suburban aspects of the project will deal with unpacking familial narratives and ideas of home (nostos). There is an attempt here to “get to the bottom of it,” the “it” functioning in a myriad of ways: the city and the relationships contained within it, the family, the suburbs, the self.