Eudaimonics and the mythical method: a pilot study

Abstract

Criticising art only from a position of suspicion is an unstable epistemological and hermeneutic approach to adopt. In 2015, it resulted in the public destruction of dozens of works of "problematic" art on a South African university campus (Furlong, 2016; Pertsovsky, 2017). The incident was led by student protesters who felt that the art represented repressive ideology (Furlong, 2016; Pertsovsky, 2017). And, while this call for change in the cultural milieu of South Africa is, in a certain light, important, it is also necessary to discuss how this change is enacted, and, on a deeper level perhaps, how we could more constructively approach art as a nation in the future. Eudaimonics, a critical theory centred on wellbeing, growth, and balance offers a platform for such discourse. It suggests that the postmodern focus on "what is wrong" with art employs a hermeneutics of suspicion which may lead to unbalanced or condemning criticisms (Pawelski & Moores, 2013:27). In approaching T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land from this position, the poem and the "mythical method" (Eliot, 1923:167) by which it was written can be seen as a rich commentary on the phenomenological necessity, process, and constituent elements of sustainable change illustrated through the poetic superimposition of myth and modernity. Subsequently, this dissertation explores the possibility that The Waste Land and the mythical method demonstrate a position towards art that accounts for the simultaneous necessity of both change and stability. This aspect of Eliot's work, it is found, offers a relevant and viable approach to the necessity of sustainable cultural change in South Africa, stressing a eudaimonic consolidation between traditional and new art towards the constructive revitalisation of the contemporary cultural landscape. For a methodology this dissertation employs hermeneutic phenomenology informed by a eudaimonic perspective on literary interpretation. That is, a defined interpretative structure allows for the analysis of various texts (notes, lectures, interviews, essays, articles, and primary texts), which in turn supports the argument for Eliot's poem and the mythical method.