Comparative Studies in Genre (414-0-20)

Topic

Epic, World, History

Instructors

William West

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Ezra Pound called epic "a poem including history," relating and distinguishing two aspects of what may be the most ancient of all poetic forms. Epic poems articulate stories that are also histories; they represent history, and as they are passed from age to age and culture to culture—as they pass into history—they become history themselves, of their world and of their own form. Individual epics emerge from many different worlds—of archaic Greece, newly imperial Rome, the colonial Americas, revolutionary early modern England, the myriad-minded Caribbean archipelago, among others—and take it upon themselves to contain worlds, the one they emerge from and other, possible worlds. Individual epics and epic as a genre has been associated with primitive nationalism, imperialist ambition, and the agentless insatiability of capitalist modernity, but also with resistance to them, especially among contemporary writers who have explored epic as a critique of the universal solvency of the novel. In this course we will explore epic as a poetic form that seeks to make worlds and histories.

Class Materials (Required)

Readings will be drawn from epics like Homer's Iliad (and Alice Oswald's Memoriam); Vergil's Aeneid (and Renaissance imitations like those of Maffeo Vegio, Camões' Lusiads, or Ercilla's Araucana); Dante's Inferno (and Lorna Goodison's Jamaican reframing); Milton's Paradise Lost (and Lucy Hutchinson's responsive Order and Disorder, Blake's Milton or Pullman's Dark Materials or Malcolm X's revolutionary Milton); Joyce's Ulysses; and Derek Walcott's Omeros, as well as theorists of epic, history, and worlds, including Bakhtin, Greene, Lukacs, Moretti, Herder, Schiller, Voltaire, Ovid, Quint, Tasso, and others.