cover image: Epic and Genre: Beyond the Boundaries of Media /

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Epic and Genre: Beyond the Boundaries of Media /

17 Jan 2017

It is from a conventional understanding of the epic, as the story of a hero in the mould of a Gilgamesh or an Achilles, whence comes the belief that the genre is antiquated and irrelevant. [...] Bakhtin felt that the Hellenistic period marked the advent of the novel, and he cites the Socratic dialogues and Menippean satire, as well as the Hellenistic romances, as evidence of the collapse of epic in ancient. [...] The relationship between the protagonist and his world, the scale of that relationship, and the protagonist’s range of action are more important than the particulars of that action or the form by which that action is mediated and narrated. [...] Thus the muthos was the “epic” of the Homeric bard, while the epos was an instance of less formal speech contained within the muthos (25); in other words, the recitation of the Homeric poem itself was considered an instance of muthos, whereas the recitation of a speech in the first person within that poem was an epos. [...] For the present purpose of articulating a genre theory of epic we have a number of productive ideas: the Aristotelean notions of epic seriousness, quality, and expansiveness; Lukács’ insights into the role of the community; Frye on the heroic range of action; Bakhtin and Moretti, with some Bourdieu, on the epic in relation to its literary universe; Nagy and Fairclough’s communicative, performative
culture genre literature philosophy poetry fiction aristotle arts and entertainment virgil aeneas fabula and syuzhet hero hegel dido the aeneid epic and novel postmodern aeneid epic poetry
Pages
36
Published in
London, ON, CA

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