Abstract
Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis.
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1 The student referred to as S in this paper was a student from a class some few years ago. She inspired the thinking in this paper, but I have taught many other students with similar mental health problems. For reasons of privacy and anonymity, I have removed identifying detail of this student and her work from my paper, while retaining enough to further critical discussion. No specifics of student, her illness or work are given; and at no point do I quote from her work. And interestingly, other students have been drawn to write on the more curious aspects of voices in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The removal of identifying detail also reflects the idea of loss of identity experienced due to a narrative of mental illness on campus, which this essay explores. The student in the paper – though she does exist, and many others like her – can be read as an icon of sorts, not identifiable, in fact, because of the diagnosis.
2 I have explored this image of Ophelia in the media with particular reference to the work of Joss Whedon. (See Whedon 2015, 243-50).
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Hawkes, J. Imposing Order to See the Disorder: Student Depression and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A (Mis)reading/Diagnosis. J Med Humanit 39, 455–471 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-018-9525-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-018-9525-1