The Waste Land at 100: Questioni di adattamento e transtestualità per un post-/pop-Eliot

The modernist long poem The Waste Land has recently been the object of attention of scholars and critics owing to the centenary celebrations of its publication in 1922. Considered as one of the most canonised, enigmatic and frequently cited works of T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land is deeply embedded in a transtextual web of relations and allusions that also includes metatextual hints. Questioning the possibility of adapting modernist poetry and its stylistic features, this paper aims to show the strategies adopted in three adaptations of The Waste Land, therefore bridging the gap between modernism and post-modernist literary products. The analysis of the installation The Wasteland by Juan Muñoz (1986), the Waste Land Project by photographer Sally Waterman (2005-10) and the eponymous graphic novel by Martin Rowson (1990; 2012) will highlight the connections between these latter adaptations and their hypotext, especially in relation to the metatextual and transtextual features of the former. It will be subsequently posited that these contributions determine the beginning of a new phase in the afterlife of the poem and the poet as well, in a way we could define as “post-/pop-Eliot”