Modern Epic

Modern Epic
Author: Franco Moretti
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1996
Genre: Epic literature
ISBN: 9781859849347

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Having coined a new term modern epic, the author analyses the phenomenon, & attempts to situate the works of e.g. Joyce, Proust & Musil within our literary tradition.

The Lyrical in Epic Time

The Lyrical in Epic Time
Author: David Der-wei Wang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2015-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 023153857X

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In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait. The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.

The Aeneid and the Modern World

The Aeneid and the Modern World
Author: J.R. O'Neill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000538826

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This collection of essays from a diverse group of scholars represents a multidisciplinary redeployment of the Aeneid that aims to illuminate its importance to our present moment. It provides a rigorous and multifaceted answer to the question, "Why should we still think about the Aeneid?" The book contains chapters detailing previously undocumented modern literary receptions of Vergil’s epic, addressing the Aeneid’s relevance to understanding modern political discourse, explaining how the Aeneid assists in making sense of the pressing current issues of trauma and damage to one’s sense of identity, and even looking at how the epic can shape our future. The chapters build upon and extend beyond reception studies to provide the most current and complete answer to the question of the epic’s current relevance. The primary audiences for this collection are undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional academics from all disciplines. This collection should be of interest to readers whose academic interests include textual and cultural studies, classics, comparative literature, pedagogy, medical humanities, veterans studies, trauma studies, immigration studies, young adult fiction, world literature, communication and political discourse, citizenship studies, and ethnic studies.

Gilgamesh among Us

Gilgamesh among Us
Author: Theodore Ziolkowski
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801463424

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The world's oldest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh recounts the adventures of the semimythical Sumerian king of Uruk and his ultimately futile quest for immortality after the death of his friend and companion, Enkidu, a wildman sent by the gods. Gilgamesh was deified by the Sumerians around 2500 BCE, and his tale as we know it today was codified in cuneiform tablets around 1750 BCE and continued to influence ancient cultures—whether in specific incidents like a world-consuming flood or in its quest structure—into Roman times. The epic was, however, largely forgotten, until the cuneiform tablets were rediscovered in 1872 in the British Museum's collection of recently unearthed Mesopotamian artifacts. In the decades that followed its translation into modern languages, the Epic of Gilgamesh has become a point of reference throughout Western culture. In Gilgamesh among Us, Theodore Ziolkowski explores the surprising legacy of the poem and its hero, as well as the epic’s continuing influence in modern letters and arts. This influence extends from Carl Gustav Jung and Rainer Maria Rilke's early embrace of the epic's significance—"Gilgamesh is tremendous!" Rilke wrote to his publisher's wife after reading it—to its appropriation since World War II in contexts as disparate as operas and paintings, the poetry of Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky, novels by John Gardner and Philip Roth, and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Xena: Warrior Princess. Ziolkowski sees fascination with Gilgamesh as a reflection of eternal spiritual values—love, friendship, courage, and the fear and acceptance of death. Noted writers, musicians, and artists from Sweden to Spain, from the United States to Australia, have adapted the story in ways that meet the social and artistic trends of the times. The spirit of this capacious hero has absorbed the losses felt in the immediate postwar period and been infused with the excitement and optimism of movements for gay rights, feminism, and environmental consciousness. Gilgamesh is at once a seismograph of shifts in Western history and culture and a testament to the verities and values of the ancient epic.

The Way Things Were.

The Way Things Were.
Author: Aatish Taseer
Publisher: Dylan Fazel
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2016
Genre: Delhi (India)
ISBN:

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When Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude. Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - 'The way things were' is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart. Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from the past four decades, fusing private and political, classical and contemporary to thrilling effect, this book confirms Aatish Taseer as one of the most arresting voices of his generation.

Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World

Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World
Author: Margaret Beissinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1999-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780520210387

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Fourteen essays on epic, oral and literary, from ancient to modern, from the Americas to India.

Privacy in the Modern Age

Privacy in the Modern Age
Author: Marc Rotenberg
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1620971089

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The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records are available for sale to strangers; our children are fingerprinted and their every test score saved for posterity; and small robots patrol our schoolyards and drones may soon fill our skies. The contributors to this anthology don't simply describe these problems or warn about the loss of privacy—they propose solutions. They look closely at business practices, public policy, and technology design, and ask, “Should this continue? Is there a better approach?” They take seriously the dictum of Thomas Edison: “What one creates with his hand, he should control with his head.” It's a new approach to the privacy debate, one that assumes privacy is worth protecting, that there are solutions to be found, and that the future is not yet known. This volume will be an essential reference for policy makers and researchers, journalists and scholars, and others looking for answers to one of the biggest challenges of our modern day. The premise is clear: there's a problem—let's find a solution.

The Bad Guys in Attack of the Zittens (The Bad Guys #4)

The Bad Guys in Attack of the Zittens (The Bad Guys #4)
Author: Aaron Blabey
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1338087541

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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! "I wish I'd had these books as a kid. Hilarious!" -- Dav Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants and Dog ManThey may look like Bad Guys, but these wannabe heroes are doing good deeds...whether you like it or not! This New York Times bestselling illustrated series is perfect for fans of Dog Man and Captain Underpants.It's a zombie kitten apocalypse!Can the Bad Guys save the world from evil Dr. Marmalade's meowing monsters?!? They'll need help from foxy Agent Fox, a swampy secret zombie antidote, and the feistiest, toothiest, hungriest granny around. Get ready to watch the fur fly!

American Modern(ist) Epic

American Modern(ist) Epic
Author: Adam Nemmers
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1949979679

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American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.

The Lyrical and the Epic

The Lyrical and the Epic
Author: Jaroslav Průšek
Publisher:
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1980
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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Examines 20th century (especially post-revolutionary) Chinese literature in reference to the traditions and continuity of classical Chinese literature. The method is of interest to both Sinologists and those interested in methods for critical study of comparative literature.