Further Footnotes

It is sad but true that three-quarters into the twentieth century and over fifty years after the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we still have no term but ‘modern’ to describe the kind of literature associated, above all, with these two writers. It is sadder still that to this day criticism of such literature continues to lean in the direction of interpretation rather than evaluation. One would expect the word modern to be value-free, a mere term of description.