Literature cannot be discussed in a social and cultural vacuum, because it is a culture-bound political construct. This paper investigates the Iimits of the modernist canon, focusing on the relationship between T. S. Eliot and women. Previous formalistic readings of Eliot is이ated the critics and readers from social and biographical concerns, which made it impossible to evaluate him in a balanced viewpoint. In recent decades, as Gibert indicates, "the criteria used to evaluate writers and to understand literary
history have shifted from an emphasis on formal elements to an emphasis on ethical and moral ones. The poetics of Eliot, who is considered one of the most influential leading modernists, is closely related to his politics implied in his poetics.’'(191). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their essay entitled "Tradition and Female Talent" in No Man ’'s Land, attacks the mas띠Iinity of the modernists, especially Eliot, identifying modernism as masculinism. This paper reviews the re-evaluation of Eliot and of Iiterary modernism by such feminist critics. There can be found some problems and limits in the process of the formation of the modernist canon, which is delicately related with masculinism as indicated by Gilbert and Gubar. However, their presumption that modernism is a product of sexual battle also reveals its Iimits, because it is developed by the use of extreme binary logic. Consequently, this paper, trying to pin down the position of Eliot in the modernist canon, aims to extend the horizon of the understanding of Eliot and modernism as well, by indicating the problems and Iimits in the formation of the modernist canon and also those of the feminist criticism. Its clue lies in Eliot’s essay "Tradition and the lndividual Talent." ’Tradition’ by which Eliot means involves in it the possibility of the revision and innovation as well as the reservation. It is because "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." as Eliot emphasized in his essay. When the dynamism implied in the concept of "tradition" is properly understood, the new (the really new) work of art by women writers will be included in tradition, and the feminist criticism will be properly evaluated beyond its misunderstandings and distortions revealed in the blind attack on modemist writers and the modemist canon as well.

• 김구슬(협성대학교) | Koo-Seul Kim