Assess graduate students' ability to identify and analyze the principal symbols and thematic structures in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, including motifs of water/dryness, mythic allusion, fragmentation, death and potential renewal, and cultural memory; require close-reading of key passages, evaluation of Eliot's notes and intertextual sources, and application of critical frameworks (e.g., modernist theory, myth or psychoanalytic criticism) to synthesize interpretations supported by textual evidence and secondary scholarship.