Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez [Paperback]

Franco Moretti (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1859840698 | ISBN-13: 978-1859840696 | Publication Date: March 1, 1996

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders and The Way of the World.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Verso (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859840698
• ISBN-13: 978-1859840696
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #881,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of the World, June 25, 2006

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This review is from: Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (Paperback)

Modern Epic is a formidable epic in and of itself. There is something almost evil about the way Professor Moretti reconstructs the occult roads of the literary and political chaos we call Modernism. Moretti begins by doubting the coherence of the term Modernism - the irreconcilability of texts as different as Ulysses and Metamorphosis. He then suggests that one of the major achievements (and quests) of writers from Goethe to the present is to create world-texts, scriptures, anachronistic verbal beasts that are essentially forms of epic literature. As primary epics have foundational relationships to various cultures one can see Moretti's point when he asserts that writers like Goethe, Wagner, Pound, Joyce, and the neglected master Imre Madach have agendas that are almost luciferian. For my part I cannot go with Moretti who prefers culture over wisdom but I am seduced by what I see as a program he describes in his book - the quest for a universal mythology - the epic story of humanity written from the periphery. Moretti discovers the epic nature of "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" which was written from the global periphery as most epics are. And epics such as "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" show the literary spirit at its most clear and visionary - as distinct from national novels of manners.

World literature is the cultural dominance. Vacations into national literatures or subcultural literatures have their charm but world literature and its movement through the modern epic is where the cultural spirit is at its most intense and relevant.