From Fear to Fruition: Ted Hughes' Fulbright Scholars as a Kristevan Response to Eliot's Prufrock

This paper explores narrators with starkly contrasting perspectives on life, action, and self-perception. In Fulbright Scholars, Hughes presents a speaker who is bold, unapologetic, and firmly grounded in the present moment, while Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock introduces a narrator immobilized by hesitation, self-doubt, and an overwhelming fear of judgment. These differences, however, should not be merely read as opposition. Rather, drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, Hughes' poem can be seen as a dialogic response to Eliot's work—an acknowledgment of Prufrock's influence and a reimagining of its existential dilemmas. Through this intertextual lens, Hughes' speaker's decisiveness can be interpreted as a counterpoint to Eliot's paralysis, forming a poetic conversation that reflects broader tensions in modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. Furthermore, by reconfiguring symbolic motifs such as Eliot's hesitant peach-into moments of sensory engagement, Hughes transforms modernist anxiety into postmodern acceptance. This reworking underscores the 'subject-in-process' as a central poetic figure, embracing uncertainty, memory's incompleteness, and the fluidity of meaning. In doing so, Fulbright Scholars not only converses with Prufrock but also reframes the limitations of language as sites of creative potential, revealing how intertextual dialogue can reshape inherited symbols into new acts of becoming.

کلیدواژه ها:

Ted Hughes ، T.S. Eliot ، Fulbright Scholars ، The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ، Intertextuality ، Julia Kristeva ، Dialogism