Features of the Epic

Question 1

Summarise Lukacs’ key points about the epic

(7)

Answer 1

1. ‘Tranforms [dull] moments into the true level of life … [by] abolishing triviality and coming closer to the essence’
2. Lack of ‘heaviness’ means that can transcend from fetters of material world to harmonious totality of a divine plan
3. By trascending the ‘world of distances’ ‘transforms the individual into a component of the whole’
4. All characters’ actions have a meaning, individual part of whole
5. Epic characters ‘internally homogenous’ so ‘men do not differ quantitatively from one another’
6. About the destiny of a community, not an individual
7. ‘community … is an organic - and therefore intrinsically meaningful - concrete totality’

Question 2

Summarise Bakhtin’s key points on the epic

(4)

Answer 2

1. Concerned with national‘absolute’ past (‘firsts’ and ‘bests’) - ‘represented past’ ‘inaccessible’ to present.
2. When ‘everything is good’ and ‘beginning of everything good’ - can have ‘greatness only in past, not present’
3. National tradition, not personal experience, is its key subject - fills epic distance between story and listeners
4. ‘An absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality’
5. In epic we always know what will happen - ‘closed’ and ‘conclusive’ - therefore does not permit subjective perspective. Sacred.
   
   1. ‘It is impossible to experience it, analyze it, take it apart, penetrate into its core’
6. Only way to make personal time heroic is to depersonalise, remove ourselves to give outsider perspective, necessity of distance
7. Epic as ‘memorial’ - creates ‘future memory of the past’ - ‘only that which is worth being remembered’
8. All points o fepic ‘equidistant’ from present, ‘it contains within itseld .. the entire fullness of time’

Question 3

Ian Watt on the epic

(5)

Answer 3

1. Novels not really manifestations of epics at all!
2. C18 readers unconvinced about epic’s relevance to their contemporary condition
3. Defoe: not factual enough
4. Richardson: pagan - violent and uncivilised
5. Richard Blackwell: ‘the marvellous and the wonderful is the nerve of the epic strain: but what marvellous things happen in a well-ordered state? We can hardly be surprised.’