New materialist meaning-making in modernist poetry: Multiple agencies in T. S. Eliot’s works

Date

2026-1-19

Author

Özmen, Meriç Tutku

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This dissertation offers a critical re-reading of T. S. Eliot’s poetry through the lens of new materialist and object-oriented thought, arguing that Eliot’s modernist poetics engage questions of nonhuman agency, material entanglement, and ontological scale that resonate with contemporary theoretical debates. Moving beyond anthropocentric and purely symbolic readings, the study adopts a material-discursive approach in which poetic meaning emerges from the interaction of language, objects, environments, and forces rather than from the expressive interiority of a unified subject. Central to this intervention is a reformulation of Eliot’s “objective correlative” as an “object-oriented correlative,” culminating in the concept of the “hyperobjective correlative.” Through diffractive readings of the selected poems, the dissertation demonstrates how Eliot’s poems foreground the agency of matter, the permeability of bodies, and the presence of expansive structures such as time and religion. Each chapter aligns a dominant poetic orientation with a distinct theoretical lens: vital materiality highlights the activity of everyday and elemental objects; transcorporeality attends to bodily and environmental permeability; and hyperobject theory elucidates the poems’ engagement with temporal and spiritual forms that exceed human perception. By tracing a conceptual shift from “objective” to “object” and ultimately to “hyperobject,” the dissertation argues that Eliot’s poetry relocates meaning from representational resolution to material-discursive process. In doing so, it argues that Eliot can be positioned as a pivotal figure for rethinking modernist poetry within posthumanist and ecological horizons, and offers a new critical vocabulary for attending to the material life of poetic form.

Subject Keywords

T. S. Eliot, New materialism, Material-discursive meaning, Object-oriented correlative, Hyperobjective correlative

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118333

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis