About
Jewel Spears Brooker is Professor Emerita of Literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida where she received awards for teaching, scholarship, and campus leadership. She has held visiting research or teaching appointments at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford (Merton College), Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, and Doshisha (Kyoto) Universities.
Dr. Brooker is the author of T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (2018), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, co-author, Joseph Bentley). She is the co-editor with Ronald Schuchard of two volumes of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918 (2014) and Still and Still Moving, 1954-1965 (2019). Dr. Brooker edited T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004), Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays (1988), and Conversations with Denise Levertov (1998). She has written scores of essays on modern writers, including Eliot, Conrad, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, Katherine Anne Porter, and Shusaku Endo. She has given over 100 lectures, including keynote addresses in London, Paris, Florence, Seoul, Kyoto, and Jerusalem.
Dr. Brooker has received numerous awards, including the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who in America. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trust and has served as president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, the T. S. Eliot Society, the society for Christianity and Literature, and other professional organizations. Dr. Brooker served six years as a member of the National Humanities Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. .
Featured Work
T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination
What accounts for the striking differences in T. S. Eliot's early, middle, and late masterpieces - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? Both in the development of his oeuvre and in the structure of individual poems, the common thread is a dialectical pattern of return - that is, of moving beyond opposites by looping back, a pattern articulated in his student work in philosophy in 1914 and in his last major poem. "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" (Little Gidding V). The differences in content reflect a movement from the existential to the cultural to the philosophical, and in style, from internal debate to juxtaposed fragments to meditation. A similar triadic dialectical pattern is evident in the exilic imagination that informs individual poems.
