(Minor Field) The American Epic

RATIONALE If modernism is about achieving art by crossing (and representing the crossing of) cultural, linguistic and ideological frontiers-and about conceiving of such art as "extraterritorial," as George Steiner said-then epic makes for an interesting case. Epic is always concerned with crossing frontiers. Traditionally, "epic" is understood as an ancient, narrative poetic mode; as such, "epic" should not apply to so relatively young a tradition as American literature. Moreover, traditional epics champion an unbounded, pre-State spirit against which modernity (for America has relatively little tradition before the modern era), with its Laws and fortified boundaries, seems to chafe. Yet certain texts of American literature do what epic has always done: Melville's Moby Dick (others have argued before I) establishes an American national identity; Whitman's Leaves of Grassdoes something similar, featuring all the while an underlying orality; The Iceman Comethfeatures an epic hero's cyclical departure and return. I have arranged this field to accord with my essential interest in the challenge of, and flexibility in, form meeting function; as such, I have tried to pair writers of different genres at work on somewhat similar projects at the same time. So I will examine how O'Neil uses theater to express a pathetic waiting for an epic hero in New York City while, at the same time, Williams uses the long poem to create a sense of the epic in one small town. I will study Derek Walcott and Vladimir Nabokov side by side, two immigrants who nevertheless represent in their careers and work a profoundly American identity: in Pale Fire, Nabokov explores the creation of an American life partly against a mythic Russian past; in Omeros, Walcott explores a St. Lucian identity partly within an American context. For its exploration of multiple forms to represent the newness of modernity and modern identity, American epic is in many ways a modernist mode. And then modernism itself-as a tradition that developed historically-shifted its primary site of practice, to speak somewhat generally, from the West to the frontier: from France to Great Britain to the United States. As such, modernism is itself epic.

PRIMARY READINGS Herman Melville — Moby Dick (1851), The Confidence Man (1857) Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass (1855) . . . [and/or Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn] Henry James — The American Scene(1907) Gertrude Stein — The Making of the Americans (selections) (1906-8) John Dos Passos — Manhattan Transfer (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby (1925) Nathaniel West — The Dream Life of BalsoSnell (1931), A Cool Million (1934), Day of the Locust (1939) Hart Crane — The Bridge (1930) T. S. Eliot — The Waste Land (1922, 1943) Djuna Barnes — Nightwood (1936) William Carlos Williams — Paterson (1946) Eugene O'Neill — Iceman Cometh (1946), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956), Mourning Becomes Electra William Carlos Williams — The Great American Novel, In the American Grain Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita (1955) . . . [or Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985)] Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire (1962) [possibly also Barthes's S/Z] Derek Walcott — Omeros (1990) William Faulkner — Absalom! Absolom! (1936) [or The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932)] Thomas Pynchon — Gravity's Rainbow (1973) SECONDARY READINGS Mikhail Bakhtin — The Dialogic Imagination (1981) Walter Benjamin — "The Storyteller" (1936) Northrop Frye — Anatomy of Criticism (1957) esp. Fourth Essay "Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres, Specific Encylcopaedic Forms Georg Lukacs — Theory of the Novel Edward Mendelson — "Encyclopedic Narratives: From Dante to Pynchon" in MLN 91 (1976) Mendelson and Seidel (eds) — Homer to Brecht (1977) Franco Moretti — Modern Epic (1996) Ian Watt — "Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel" from the Rise of the Novel