Modern Epic Book

Moretti connects a particular breed of text - Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, among others - with the epic, and calls them Modern Epic. This is due to the many similarities these two genres share with each other, with the modern epic putting a distinct spin on some of the older tropes and techniques.

In an essay on the epic and the novel, Massimo Fusillo points toward Hegel's assertion that not only the epic was the primeval literary form par excellence, but also that the novel was the "modern bourgeois epic" upholding the qualities the epic has established during a time that favored shorter forms (Hegel, 2:1092, qtd. in Fusillo 32). The epic is interested in describing the events pertaining to a single culture. The modern epic, on the other hand, has one distinct difference: It represents a "supranational dimension of the represented space" (2), that incorporates a multitude of voices and places, which is why he links the modern epic with the metaphor of the "world text".

One of the unifying characteristics of the modern epic is that they make extensive use of polyphony, a term introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, which will be of central concern in 3.1. The epic features events and heroic actions that are significant to one particular culture; the modern epic, on the other hand, synthesizes the voices of many nations and cultures into an amalgamation of polyphony, heteroglossia and hybridity, a feat that was more or less impossible in the epic (cf. Bakhtin, 'Epic and Novel'). Moretti's approach thus closely resembles Bakhtin's. The novel and the epic with all of their "polyphonic and monologic tensions […] continually interfere" with each other, which ensures "their mutual survival" (Ercolino, 15). This interference transgresses temporal and spatial sequence, something Ernst Bloch calls "non-contemporaneity": Individual voices, while living at the same time, exhibit cultural and political viewpoints from many different epochs, a shift from a Nacheinander to a Nebeneinander (Moretti 41-2). The modern epic tries to represent the world in all its complexity, as an "open, heterogeneous, incomplete" (59) place of cacophonous polyphony.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel'. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, London: University of Texas Press, 1981. 3-40.

Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Trans. Albert Sbragia. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Fusillo, Massimo. 'Epic, Novel'. [2002], trans. Michael F. Moore. In: The Novel, Vol. II, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 32-63.

Hegel, Georg, Friedrich Wilhelm. Aesthetics [1836-38]. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.