ABSTRACT
In the epic, the people rests after the day's labor; it listens, dreams, and collects. Nothing contributes more to the dangerous silencing of the human spirit; nothing stifles the soul of narration more thoroughly than the shameless expansion that the reading of novels has undergone in all of our lives. Academic specialization largely concealed from a professor the fact that an enormous variety of non-western societies also have works that, if construed without slavish adherence to European classical rubrics, are unmistakably epic. Folklorists are often faithful to the "low" oral culture, defining themselves as champions of the cultural underdog, and are wary of letting literary high-culture types lay claim to their material by means of such markers as epic. A new generation has, however, grown up without the prejudices against epic that accompanied the revolt against grand narrative. The avant-garde literary world since the postmodern movement emerged has been largely dismissive of epic.
