hubris?
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu)
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 01:16:05 -0500 (EST)
on JDS as modern romantic epic writer:
Milton and Spenser wrote the only epics in the English language. Other
people have tried to write epics, but they didn't exactly work out.
Anxiety of influence? Hardly. The epic form is no longer available.
_The Prelude_ imagines epic, but come on.
"In Memoriam" doesn't even get the MLA underline treatment.
"Don Juan"? I think the advent of novelistic discourse a la Bakhtin
erased the possibility of epic.
Joyce mocked it (very well). Eliot subverted it (we think). Pound
approved (from inside his cage). I doubt Salinger ever even read a
Western epic. You start either with Tolstoy or _The Faerie Queene_, after
which there is no turning back, and we know where Salinger started.
Clinamen
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mkozusko@virtual.park.uga.edu