"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: the modern epic 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 Leitmotiv; 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
magical 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 of One Hundred Years of
Solitude in particular) constitutes a ritual
self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.
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