“You and I”: The Fragmentation of the Writing Self and the Tradition of Modernism in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Gabriel Josipovici’s Moo Pak

Abstract

This article undertakes as its subject the parodic relation between Gabriel Josipovici’s novel Moo Pak and T.S. Eliot’s debut and most famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Rewriting “Prufrock” into a new reality and a fictional mode becomes an occasion for Josipovici to question Eliot’s “Impersonal theory of poetry” and advance his own dialectical vision of the creative process as well as his Modernist aesthetics. Josipovici’s reinterpretation of Eliot’s youthful masterpiece shows both works as stories of artistic creation illustrating their authors’ critical convictions.