are modern epics impossible because our spirit is too advanced

Harry Potter.

Watchmen

>>9414248
>underworld
>infinite jest
>pynchon
>mcelroy
>The tunnel

memes as they may be, epics they all certainly are

There are plenty of modern epics. Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Women and Men, the Gormenghast books, Underworld...

>>9414248
great image, great title, made me chuckle. other than that i've nothing too add to this thread, sorry.

>>9414248
The modern epics are novels. It hasn't gone away at all.

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There is no more room for sincere tragedy or comedy because to have one or the other would require its participants to have some quality of humanity. The pure ideology of humanism (the religion of "I Myself"), by extruding any uniqueness into a generality, has killed all four (peculiarity, generality, tragedy, and comedy). A contemporary epic would have to subvert the appeal of the unique as general (the banal unique), i.e. break the neopagan postmodernist mode of art that expresses genius peculiarity as a general condition.

The "neoreactionaries" work toward this in the form of petitioning a regression to norms of inequality, but the end of this philosophy simply brings us back to where we currently are. What is needed is a dismissal of both Marx and Hegel, and a radical reassertion of the inequality and ungenerality inherent in the notion of uniqueness.

>>9414275
>>9414264
>25th century professor
>this semester we will learn about 20th century in its totality, the best preparation is reading Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Women and Men, the Gormenghast books, Underworld...
i can't see that happen

>>9414297
so restore old generality but create new uniqueness?

>>9414248
is that pic real?

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>>9414366
yeah, reverse search says the photographer is Melanie Einzig
>Einzig

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>>9414358
I don't think generality needs to be "restored": humans reflexively resort to generalities. Uniqueness will always be "new" if it is pronounced enough, i.e. it will appear as Zizek's "truly moral act ex nihilo." While I agree with him that "ex nihilo" is a necessarily materialist notion, I disagree with his ascription of morality to an act that possess this property. He ignores the necessity of determined self-ownership to accomplish such an act.

By "dismissal" I mean assimilation. Each person understanding that Marx's ideas are as worthless as Evola's when presented in a vacuum will result in the "dismissal." I yoke Marx's ideas to my purpose, and make them my servant.

The fall of the capitalist religion, the end of worship of "the Self" as something outside of the self (pure alienation) can only come (for a particular person) when a person takes their "Self" back into their unspeakable, unknowable, language-resisting self. In this realization, uniqueness is given own expression, as opposed to "free expression," which is the admonition of capitalism.

>>9414310
that's because you're probably retarded

>>9414248
Brief history is def epic

>>9414386
does fiction exist that comes close to this?

>>9414433
Contemporary fiction? I haven't heard of any, but I'm trying to write it. I would love some recs as well.

As for things written in the past, to me Tolstoi is a very egoistic writer, and the parts where he's writing about how spooked he is by his "holy Love" are easy to pick out. His criticisms of reputation, ambition, and bureaucracy could all be effectively applied to our current political climate with some slight modifications, e.g. they function just as well without a Christian basis.

>>9414310
It will with Gormenghast, long after the other pleb trash he mentioned has been forgotten

>>9414449
mh, good luck with your project. i have no recs but something about uniqueness and generality reminded me of aesthetic treatises by early romanticists like friedrich schlegel and schelling when they formulated definition of mythus as a rare identity of the special and the general, where something is both an allegory and an archetype at once.

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Are superheros modern epic mythos?

Is an epic not possible due to the death of literature as an art form in preference to movies?