10. Literary masterpiece as a literary bank

Abstract

This chapter attempts to model a digital representation of all the intertextual references alluded to in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It encompasses the references Eliot incorporated into this masterpiece, from Classical and Biblical texts to his contemporary literary texts, followed by an inventory of post-Waste Land texts which borrowed from the text in question. This work produced by Eliot throws any reader or scholar into a labyrinth of intertextuality and literary allusions, the sheer magnitude of which can potentially confuse as the range of the references reaches far and wide. There is a scholarly dispute about the changing paradigm of critical research works under the veneer of digital technology, as many are apprehensive about losing epistemological and ontological aspects of critical research work in the field of humanities under the sustained pressure of employing a digital medium.1 But, having the benefit of an archival digital repository and its capability to quickly access multiple texts from various resources corroborates the view that technology can facilitate the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the field of humanities. The main objective of this research is to create a repository where all the intertextual references of Eliot’s poem The Waste Land could be stored. This chapter will employ three different steps to demonstrate different sources of references and allusions that were used in the production of The Waste Land.