Suburban Life Translation in Literature

Order Description

In his work \”Tradition and the Individual Talents,\” T.S Eliot asserts:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order…will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.\”

Drawing upon Eliot\’s passage, write a 5-7 page essay formatted and cited per MLA guidelines (12 point Times New Roman font double-spaced) that explains how reading \”Little Children\” has shaped your understanding of the suburban novel. Include the novels \”White Noise\”, \”Revolutionary Road\”, \”Stepford Wives\”, and \”The Ice Storm\” as your other sources.