Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez by Franco Moretti

This book examines a class of literary works it classifies as modern epics, including Faust, Moby Dick, The Nieblung's Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moretti argues that these works all come from places in a world-system, rather than a nation state, and that the question of the epic form is not whether it appears, but whether it is possible to be successful. Moretti takes a very Darwinian approach to literary criticism: he argues that the form evolves as authors experiment with existing forms--and that some developments work better than others. He begins by looking at the 19th century epic and Faust--in which Goethe uses Mephistopheles in order to give Faust his innocence. Another epic innovation in the 19th century, according to Moretti, is history as a metaphor for geography. These epics have lots of polyphony and contain allegory run amok, in a fragmented, encyclopedic, mechanical presentation of information.

Moretti examines Ulysses and the 20th century in terms of both stream-of-consciousness (and Moretti distinguishes between stream-of-consciousness used to highlight a crisis or move the plot forward and the ordinary, everyday stream-of-consciousness) and polyphony.

Finally, Moretti closes with a look at One Hundred Years of Solitude in which he identifies a different epic project--whereas Ulysses expands spatially but only has a single day, García Márquez's book is very locally centered (on Macondo) in a Buddenbrooks model, but expands over a long period of time. He also considers lo real maravilloso--a move that rehabilitates narrative. Overall, I found this book fairly helpful--while I wonder about his criteria for defining epic, I think his discussions of both stream-of-consciousness and polyphony quite illuminating.