Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez

Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez

â€œTake Faust, what is it? A â€˜tragedyâ€™, 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 â€˜singular medley,â€™ as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... â€˜It is no longer a novel,â€™ T.S. Eliot said of Ulysses. But if not novels, then what are they?â€

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 â€œsacred textsâ€ of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy capable of accommodating Faust, Moby-Dick, The Nibelungâ€™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 Goetheâ€™s FaustÂ and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagnerâ€™s RingÂ and on to a sociology of modernist technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of â€œmagic realismâ€ as a compromise formation between a number of modernist devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the westâ€™s enthusiastic reception of these texts (and One Hundred Years of SolitudeÂ in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.
Country USA
Brand Verso
Manufacturer Verso
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9781859840696
Color Silver
ReleaseDate 1996-04-17
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781859840696

Country	USA
Brand	Verso
Manufacturer	Verso
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9781859840696
Color	Silver
ReleaseDate	1996-04-17
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781859840696

Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez

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