Modern Epic Av Franco Moretti

"Take <i>Faust</i>, what is it? A ‘tragedy’, as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about <i>Moby-Dick</i>? 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 <i>Ulysses</i>. But if not novels, then what are they?"<br>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 <i>Faust</i>, <i>Moby-Dick, The Nibelung’s Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities </i>and <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i>.<br>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.<br>Opening with an analysis of Goethe’s <i>Faust</i> and the different historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a discussion of Wagner’s <i>Ring</i> 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 <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i> in particular) constitutes a ritual self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.