Desire and the Ascetic Ideal

Edward Upton is Associate Professor of Humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Eliot and Skillful Means 1. Skillful Means and Asceticism in T.S. Elliot's Critique of Schopenhauer 2. T.S. Eliot's "Ars Religiosa": Transmigration and Faith in Knowledge and Experience 3. India among the Fragments: Pessimism and Desire in "The Waste Land" 4. Language and the Cultivation of Desire in The Fire Sermon 5. Transcendence Revisited: Hallucination and Literary Asceticism 6. Language in the Middle Way: T.S. Eliot's Engagement with Madhyamaka Buddhism in "Four Quartets" 7. Performing the Divine Illusion: Memory, Desire, and the Performance of Form in "Burnt Norton" Notes Bibliography

"A valuable book, rich in insight and deeply knowledgeable about its subject. Upton has a smart, readable, and effective prose style. The kind of patient, knowledgeable, thoughtful elucidation that takes shape in The Education of Desire has an important contribution to make, by illuminating Eliot's engagements with sacred texts in Sanskrit and Pali, as mediated by Anglo-American, Japanese, and German specialists. There is no book in the last thirty years that has made such an important contribution to our understanding of Eliot and ancient Indian religious thought." - Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia, author of Poetry in a Global Age