Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez“Take Faust, what is it? A ‘tragedy’, as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby-Dick? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a ‘singular medley,’ as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... ‘It is no longer a novel,’ T.S. Eliot said of Ulysses. But if not novels, then what are they?” Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the “sacred texts” of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating Faust, Moby-Dick, The Nibelung’s Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities and One Hundred Years of Solitude. For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity. Opening with an analysis of Goethe’s Faust and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner’s Ring and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of “magic realism” as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the west’s enthusiastic reception of these texts (and One Hundred Years of Solitude in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism. |
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Contents
Chapter 2 | 35 |
Chapter 3 | 55 |
Chapter 4 | 77 |
Chapter 5 | 101 |
Ulysses and the Twentieth Century | 121 |
Stream of consciousness evolution of a technique | 168 |
Chapter 7 | 182 |
Chapter 8 | 213 |
One Hundred Years of Solitude | 231 |
Index | 251 |
Other editions - View all
Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez Franco Moretti No preview available - 1996 |
Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez Franco Moretti No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno advertising Ahab allegory Anna Karenin become beginning Bloom Bouvard and Pécuchet bricolage Buddenbrooks Cantos chapter commonplace complexity course culture digression drama dream Dujardin Eliot encyclopaedic episode essay everything Faber fact Faust function Goethe Goethe's happens Harmondsworth hero Hundred Ibid idea ideology individual Joyce Joyce's language literary evolution literature London longer Macondo magical realism Mahler Margareta meaning Mephistopheles metaphor metropolis Midnight's Children mind Moby-Dick modern epic monologism myth narrative never non-contemporaneity novel object once opposite Paris passage past Penguin perhaps plot poem poetics poetry polyphony polysemy possible Pound precisely Proust Radetzky March reality rhetorical Ring scene Schlaffer semantic sense sentence Siegfried Simmel social Solitude space speak stimuli story stream of consciousness style symbolic T.S. Eliot takes technique things translated true twentieth century Ulysses University Press voice Wagner Wagnerian Walpurgis Night Waste Land whole words world text world-system writes