It'll be helpful this semester to remember that we're concerned with at least three different aspects or connotations of "epic": one to do with the relation of poetics to contemporary every-day life, one to do with the evolving status and structure of the narrative hero, and one to do with the ever-changing relationships between marketing, technology, and identity.
- Poetics: If we're going to compare movies to a form of literature, it's the novel that likely comes to mind (ordinary prose, more-or-less linear plots, etc.). But one of our chief concerns this semester is the surprising set of parallels between epic poetry (as a distinctly preliterate mode of storytelling) and cinematic production (a technological mode of storytelling that's still evolving today)--parallels which include the poet's and the filmmaker's respective attentiveness to "semiotic rind" or "husk" (the linking of meanings on the basis of the most extraneous sounds or images).
- Heroics: Classical Greek heroes were fashioned in very particular ways. Epic heroes (Odysseus, for instance) are inevitably flesh-and-blood mortals--yet they're mortals of a special type: Epic heroes embody all the qualities most essential to their home community--yet typically the story begins with the hero's estrangement from home. One of our tasks is to trace the continuing presence of this type of protagonist across a surprisingly varied body of films--and in the face of the current decline of the national community (or "homeland") as the modern arbiter of identity, policy, and commerce.
- Economics: As we know, the film industry concocted the great blockbuster epics of the fifties (Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) in part in order to avoid loosing audiences to network television programming. Following up on this insight, another of our tasks this semester is to place the epic hero's on-going appearances within its various cultural, ideological, and industrial contexts. What does it mean, for instance, that many people around the world experienced their first narrative account of the Viet Nam War not through the perspective of the victorious North Vietnamese, but through the American-made film Apocalypse Now?
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