Freedom Is Not Enough
T. S. Eliot for Liberation, Resistance, and Hope
Shows the surprising ways T. S. Eliot's work sheds light on—and proves useful to—the contemporary struggle for a freer and more just world.
Description
How does literature from the past speak to the present? What can we, as readers committed to combatting oppression, learn from figures whose writing we love but some of whose beliefs we may oppose? Quite a lot, according to Patrick R. Query. To make this case, Query turns to a writer and critic as canonical as he is controversial—T. S. Eliot. Passionately argued and eminently readable, Freedom Is Not Enough shows how Eliot makes a surprising yet vital ally in the struggle to fill the world with more freedom, equality, and human dignity. Without ignoring or downplaying the bigotry and elitism that are ineluctable parts of Eliot's legacy, Query argues that we need today what Eliot has to teach us: about migration, peace, friendship, radicalism, anti-fascism, liberation, resistance, and hope. Drawing on the full scope of Eliot's oeuvre—from his most well-known poetry and prose to newly available archival materials—Freedom Is Not Enough demonstrates how to use Eliot and literature more broadly to confront the forces conspiring to turn our world into a waste land.
Patrick R. Query is Professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He is the author of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing and the editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: A Tourist in Africa.
Reviews
"This urgent and eloquent book compels readers to ask: How can literature help us in a
time of climate and social crisis? If T. S. Eliot seems like an odd choice for addressing this question, Patrick Query helps us to read with rather than against Eliot. A dominant figure in modernism and influential poet-critic who shaped the humanities through the New Criticism, Eliot turns out to be a perfect subject for considering why literary studies matter now. Taking an exciting and necessary approach to literary criticism, Query asks us to go outside of our comfortable disciplinary boundaries to think about why we read in a time of crisis." — Megan Quigley, coeditor of Eliot Now"T. S. Eliot is frequently, reverentially invoked by conservative commentators. Such commentators are so self-assured in presupposing that, because Eliot shares their commitments to Christian and Western cultural traditions, he must also share their libertarianism, isolationism, and xenophobia. Without shoehorning Eliot into any contemporary political formation, Patrick Query succeeds in showing us an Eliot who is neither a ventriloquist's dummy nor a strawman. This is not the doctrinaire Eliot who can be cynically deployed. Nor the revanchist one who can be safely ignored." — Matt Seybold, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics