On Comic Modernism: Impersonality in Eliot and Keaton

This essay seeks to illuminate the comic underpinnings of the modernist concept of impersonality in order to rethink the rhetorical affinities between T. S. Eliot and Buster Keaton. By rejecting romantic models of self-expression, the poet's compositional strategy in Inventions of the March Hare and the slapstick filmmaker's acting technique in The Playhouse exceed notions of fixed identity.