Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez

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Dissecting epics: cultural impact, classification conundrums.

If you're fascinated by how literary giants defy classification, 'Modern Epic' is for you. Franco Moretti doesn't just explore texts; he weaves a rich tapestry showing how these works shape culture and reflect power dynamics. It's a thought-provoking dive into what makes an epic, well, epic—a must-read for anyone who loves to dissect literature's role in society.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez

Regular price RM62.42 MYR
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9781859840696
Publisher: Verso
Date of Publication: 1996-04-17
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: Philosophy
Related Topics: Theory
Goodreads rating: 4.09
(rated by 80 readers)

Description

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 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; 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 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 “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 One Hundred Years of Solitude in particular
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Dissecting epics: cultural impact, classification conundrums.

If you're fascinated by how literary giants defy classification, 'Modern Epic' is for you. Franco Moretti doesn't just explore texts; he weaves a rich tapestry showing how these works shape culture and reflect power dynamics. It's a thought-provoking dive into what makes an epic, well, epic—a must-read for anyone who loves to dissect literature's role in society.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.