Transgressive intent: The postmodern epic and the subversion of generic form.

Abstract

The epic has generally been portrayed as a highly conservative genre, one which is intensely and irredeemably elitist, stable, and canonical. Epic form, as it has been conventionally understood, is antithetical to everything that postmodernism values--the blurring of boundaries between high and low cultural categories, the breaking down of established hierarchies, and the privileging of epistemological gaps and loopholes. When we examine the epic more closely, however, we discover that the epic has always been predicated upon a formal radicality and upon the transgression of formal and generic boundaries even as it participates in a revered genealogical tradition. Rather than being resistant or impervious to a postmodern critique, it is my contention that the epic is itself a proto-postmodern genre, a self-deconstructing, self-transgressive form that has proven invaluable to postmodern authors in their critique of structures of "normalcy" (whether sexual, psychological, or cultural) through their refiguration of the epic tradition. The epic is not only sympathetic to a postmodern aesthetic, ethos, or politics; it is, in fact, an ideal postmodern form. In their critical study of the epic genre, scholars generally consider Homer, Virgil, Milton, or Joyce to be the last of the great epic authors. My dissertation questions the notion that the epic has ever died out, and concerns itself, in the broadest sense, with the fate of the epic in the twentieth century and, more specifically, with the postmodern epic and its reliance upon strategies of genre transgression. Rather than having "died," the epic has simply changed, relinquishing its ties to high culture and instead incorporating mass cultural forms. By focusing upon what I consider to be epic's most significant transformation in the twentieth century--its adoption and reformulation by contemporary feminist authors--my project explores the dialectical relationships between epic and novel, postmodernism and feminism, and literature and culture. Through careful examination of the strategies of formal and thematic transgression in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, Monique Wittig's Across the Acheron, and plays by Caryl Churchill and Maureen Duffy, we begin to see that the postmodern epic is an anti-nostalgic form which critiques the epic tradition as patriarchal and ideologically conservative as it advocates a vital political, literary, and cultural subversion predicated upon a "postmodernism of resistance.".