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

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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.