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Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality,...

Paris, Vaclav.

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Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative./
Author:	Paris, Vaclav.
Description:	244 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-11(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International75-11A(E).
Subject:	English literature. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3623904
ISBN:	9781303967702

Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative.
Paris, Vaclav.

Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative. - 244 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-11(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2014.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

What is the role of epic in modernity? Does it still have any value? What shape and structure does it take? This dissertation claims that the epic does indeed continue to inform our experience of the world in modernity, albeit often in unusual ways. Focusing on the period between 1900 and 1930, it argues that certain prose narratives adapted what we often look for in older epic---that is, a total representation of the world and a national history. These texts achieve their epic aim not by narrating heroic actions, but rather by turning their attention to the everyday, encompassing totality by indexing the ordinary. Thus, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans details the "monotonous tradition" of middle-class American living; James Joyce's Ulysses follows an advertising agent around Dublin; Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk mulls over the digressions of a dog thief; and T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom privileges "daily life" over the exploits of the Arab Revolt. "Everyday Epic" reads these four texts in detail, proceeding through a fusion of formalist, historicist, queer theoretical analyses. In explaining why the everyday becomes the site of epic for Stein, Joyce, Hasek, and Lawrence, it proposes that their turn to the quotidian was entwined with contemporary ideas of evolution and sexuality. For, in the late nineteenth century, national history was often conceived through the dynamics of evolutionary (and social-evolutionary) narrative. National progress was, to this extent, implicitly dependent on biological reproduction. With the advent of new understandings of sexuality and evolution in the first decades of the twentieth century, new possibilities emerged. Instead of articulating national identity and destiny through genetic kinship, a shared ancestral past, or reproductive futurity, long modernist prose narratives often made use of dissident sexualities to address epic themes in an ambivalent present of contingent connections. Taking its cue from the modernists, "Everyday Epic" claims that in order to understand the genre in modernity, we need to reconceive it on queer or affiliative lines.

ISBN: 9781303967702Subjects--Topical Terms:

516356
English literature.

Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative.
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020 $a 9781303967702
035 $a (MiAaPQ)AAI3623904
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100 1 $a Paris, Vaclav. $3 3178076
245 1 0 $a Everyday Epic: Evolution, sexuality, and modernist narrative.
300 $a 244 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-11(E), Section: A.
500 $a Adviser: Jean-Michel Rabate.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2014.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
506 $a This item must not be added to any third party search indexes.
520 $a What is the role of epic in modernity? Does it still have any value? What shape and structure does it take? This dissertation claims that the epic does indeed continue to inform our experience of the world in modernity, albeit often in unusual ways. Focusing on the period between 1900 and 1930, it argues that certain prose narratives adapted what we often look for in older epic---that is, a total representation of the world and a national history. These texts achieve their epic aim not by narrating heroic actions, but rather by turning their attention to the everyday, encompassing totality by indexing the ordinary. Thus, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans details the "monotonous tradition" of middle-class American living; James Joyce's Ulysses follows an advertising agent around Dublin; Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk mulls over the digressions of a dog thief; and T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom privileges "daily life" over the exploits of the Arab Revolt. "Everyday Epic" reads these four texts in detail, proceeding through a fusion of formalist, historicist, queer theoretical analyses. In explaining why the everyday becomes the site of epic for Stein, Joyce, Hasek, and Lawrence, it proposes that their turn to the quotidian was entwined with contemporary ideas of evolution and sexuality. For, in the late nineteenth century, national history was often conceived through the dynamics of evolutionary (and social-evolutionary) narrative. National progress was, to this extent, implicitly dependent on biological reproduction. With the advent of new understandings of sexuality and evolution in the first decades of the twentieth century, new possibilities emerged. Instead of articulating national identity and destiny through genetic kinship, a shared ancestral past, or reproductive futurity, long modernist prose narratives often made use of dissident sexualities to address epic themes in an ambivalent present of contingent connections. Taking its cue from the modernists, "Everyday Epic" claims that in order to understand the genre in modernity, we need to reconceive it on queer or affiliative lines.
590 $a School code: 0175.
650 4 $a English literature. $3 516356
650 4 $a Comparative literature. $3 570001
650 4 $a American literature. $3 523234
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773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 75-11A(E).
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791 $a Ph.D.
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793 $a English
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3623904