Modern Epic The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez

by Moretti, Franco; Hoare, Quintin

• ISBN13: 9781859840696
• ISBN10: 1859840698
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-04-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

“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.

Author Biography

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.

Quintin Hoare is the director of the Bosnian Institute and has translated numerous works by Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, and other French authors. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Faust and the Nineteenth Century

'I want a hero...'

'In the beginning was the Deed'

Literary evolution. I

Rhetoric of innocence. I

'He sees visions of giant undertakings . . .'

An inherited form

Non-contemporaneity. I

'So many little independent worlds'

World texts. I

'An incredible musical pandemonium'

Polyphony in America. I

Polyphony in America. II

'With all the certainty of a mechanical process'

Literary evolution. II

Allegory and modernity. I

'You, I think, should know us all'

The sign run amok

Allegory and modernity. II

'But infinite forms do not exist . . .'

Transition: The Nibelung's Ring

'Drink first, hero, so that distant things don't escape you'

Monumental dilettantism

Twofold myth

Art of transition

Complexity. I

Ulysses and the Twentieth Century

The Ladies' Paradise

Stream of consciousness

Sociology of absentmindedness

The great Perhaps

Epiphany, madeleine, Leitmotiv

World texts. II

Free association

Excursus: Stream of consciousness - evolution of a technique

The other Ulysses

Literary evolution. III

Liberation of the device

Joyce/Kafka

Soul and precision

Complexity. II

Countermodernism

Compromise

Epilogue: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Magical realism

From Lubeck to Macondo

Non-contemporaneity. II

Rhetoric of innocence. II

Index

Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.