This paper explores automatons in T. S. Eliot's city looking in particular at its cultural homogeneity and lifelessness. Eliot defines tradition as the whole matrix of communal life and experience throughout generations. Individual ways of feeling and acting are constructed within the tradition of a community entailing unconscious communality and cultural diversity. Therefore Eliot's ideal community aims for a decentralization under the central direction, which leads to resistance against abstract individualism and capitalistic totalitarianism. Eliot envisions modern metropolis as the seat where cultural diversity and organic participatory are absorbed into money economy. The centripetal power of capitalism renders the present mechanical, lifeless and disenchanted. What appears in urban centers is the individuals not with intimate contact but with the cold comfort of machine connections.

• 김희성(이화여자대학교) | Hee-Sung Kim