Complete Map

Readings of Modernist poems tend to emphasise how their allusiveness and fragmentary form demand that they be read in their own terms as fields of symbols rather than as referring to a textual 'outside'. Such reading strategies might appear to make mapping of the sort engaged with on this project superfluous. Yet the chronotopic approach, which emphasises relative spatial form over geographic reference (i.e. how the different spatial frames of a text, whether 'real' or not, relate to one another) allows the mapping of texts without necessarily collapsing readings into literalist or biographical interpretative frames.

Taking the chronotopic values for each spatial frame of this visualisation of T. S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land', the start of such a symbolic spatial reading emerges with a preponderance towards the urban and the Anti-idyll.