In T. S. Eliot's early poetic works, from his juvenilia to The Waste Land, the style changes are remarkable. The coherent, homogeneous, hypotactic, linear, logical style turns into the fragmented, heterogeneous, illogical, incoherent, paratactic style. Many literary critics have reviewed the diverse literary influences as well as philosophical, artistic, political, and social influences on his poems, but they have not taken into consideration one important factor: his writing tool. A writing tool is not merely a tool to record one's thought, but it can function as “a precondition of production that contributes to our thinking prior to any conscious reaction” (Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 214). In his early career, Eliot replaced the traditional writing tools of pen and ink with a modern mechanical writing tool, typewriter. These two writing tools are closely related with two distinct ratios of human senses and two different kinds of cultures. Handwriting requires the hand's collaboration with the eye that guides the hand through each movement and constantly attending to the creation of each letter. When the visual technology of handwriting is emphasized, it transforms fragmented and heterogeneous reality into “homogeneity, uniformity, and continuity” (Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media 87). However, typewriting that depends on blind and tactile technologies does not require the use of the eye in the act of composition. When the eye does not have to participate in the typewriting act, there is a radical change of the ratio of human senses in the moment of composition. On making tremendous impacts on modern human consciousness, and on the ways in which modern human beings perceive reality, think, and produce discourse, typewriting produces fragmented and disruptive writings, in which illogical thinking, heterogeneity, multi-formity, and discontinuity are prominent. Thus, I suggest that a new poetics of fragmentation and disruption in modernist works would be profitably reconsidered with respect to the typewriting technologies that dissociate the eye from the writing acts.

• 권승혁(고려대) | Seunghyeok Kweon