Paper Topic

                For my final paper, I will be exploring the ideas of Carl Jung, influential theorist and psychiatrist of the early twentieth century.  Some of his most notable ideas include the concepts of the archetype, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity.  These notions will be explored in the course of the paper, which will ultimately relate them back to T.S. Eliot’s ideas behind the composition and structure of “The Wasteland.”  The paper will also look at Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and explore the similarities between Eliot’s ideas about literature and Jung’s conception of the nature of the human psyche.  A main argument will be a comparison between Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and Eliot’s idea that every new composition is a new voice added to a sea of other voices and ideas from past works.  This idea applies to the overall structure of “The Wasteland,” with its narrative fragments and numerous citations of passages from other works.