T.S. Eliot as inventor of the Hipster

Literary scholar Karen Swallow Prior is kind enough to credit me for mentoring her through graduate school.  I’m proud to see that she has become a “public intellectual,” writing regularly for both Christianity Today and The Atlantic.  You have got to read her essay about how the whole mindset of the hipster is captured in T. S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.”From Karen Swallow Prior, When T.S. Eliot Invented the Hipster – The Atlantic:

January 4 marks 50 years since the death of poet T. S. Eliot. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of one of Eliot’s most famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the work that thrust Eliot onto the modernist stage. An embodiment of turn-of-the century angst wrought by a world sucked dry by skepticism, cynicism, and industrialism, Prufrock bears striking similarities to a subculture of mostly white, urban, detached-yet-sensitive young adults at the cusp of our own century. One might say Eliot invented the hipster.

In a keen essay on the hipster at The New York Times, Christy Wampole describes the urban hipster as nostalgic “for times he never lived himself.” Before he makes any choice,” Wampole explains, the hipster “has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream.” A pastiche of allusive, retro gadgets, hobbies, clothing, hairstyles, and facial hair—ever increasingly referential—the hipster is “a walking citation.”

In other words, he is J. Alfred Prufrock.

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