It’s All About Economics –The Urban Ecology in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

This paper aims to reveal a social-economic pattern within T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a Modernistic post-apocalyptic poem, in which the inner self of the modern urbanite is fragmented by the post-war reality of the beginning of the last century. The main space in which the human being dwells is the city, a culturally constructed place of conflicting psychological, social, economic and natural energies. The urbanite’s interior conflict is objectified toward the social otherness and, further, over the natural other, in this way, a hierarchy of power between the social human and the natural environment having been established. This collision between incompatible and unnatural agencies is mediated by the transformation of nature in urban space through means of economic and cultural production and consumption. The sterile land represents the direct aftermath of the over-exploited, over-consumed and over(re)produced nature, which has become a social waste.