NULC

I attended the National Undergraduate Literature Conference this past weekend. It was an interesting experience, and I'm glad I could see where we as a school measure up with everyone else in the nation.

One thing that stood out to me though was in one of the lit criticisms the presenter commented on stagnation and stasis. Stagnation and stasis? That sounded familiar. I remembered then that some of the Victorian writers like Tennyson wrote largely on the topic. TS Eliot in "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" discusses paralysis in great length. This theme is as much a part of our society today as it was in their time.

We live in a society that is constantly on the edge of some new kind of change. Whether it's moral decline or a new president, or a falling economy, something is about to change our society. One of the responses to this change I think is to do nothing. Enter the 20 something year old young man refusing to grow up. But if authors of the past have written about this kind of paralysis and stasis before, should we look at their literature for an answer to our problems now?

Can "J Alfred Prufrock" be an effective commentary/solution to our present stasis? Your thoughts.