[SydPhil] Studio for Critical Antiquities: Giacomo Bianchino - The Tale of the Tribe: The Theory of the Modern Epic

[Tom Geue]

Dear all,

The Studio for Critical Antiquities is very excited to host Giacomo Bianchino to discuss his new project 'The Tale of the Tribe: The Theory of the Modern Epic'. Giacomo is currently working on turning his CUNY PhD dissertation into a book, and has generously agreed to share an extract from his dissertation introduction. He is especially looking for feedback on how the project might be developed in book form. If you would like a copy of this 30-page extract to read in preparation for our session, please send an email to tom.geue at anu.edu.au by Friday 6 November. We also ask that you register for the Critical Antiquities Network mailing list if you haven't done so already (see below).

This event will be held on Zoom on Wednesday 25 November, 9.30-11am (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne time).

Here is the time in other locations:


  *   Los Angeles/Vancouver: Tuesday 24 November, 2:30-4:00pm
  *   Chicago: Tuesday 24 November, 4:30-6:00pm
  *   Mexico City: Tuesday 24 November, 4:30-6:00pm
  *   New York: Tuesday 24 November, 5:30-7:00pm
  *   Santiago: Tuesday 24 November, 7:30-9:00pm
  *   Buenos Aires/Rio de Janeiro: Tuesday 24 November, 7:30-9:00pm
  *   Dublin/Belfast/London: Tuesday 24 November, 10:30pm-12:00am (midnight)
  *
Paris/Berlin/Rome: Tuesday 24 November, 11:30pm-1:00am
  *   Johannesburg: Wednesday 25 November, 12:30-2:00am
  *   Athens/Cairo: Wednesday 25 November, 12:30-2:00am
  *   Beijing/Singapore/Perth: Wednesday 25 November, 6:30-8:00am
  *   Tokyo: Wednesday 25 November, 7:30-9:00am
  *   Brisbane: Wednesday 25 November, 8:30-10:00am
  *   Darwin: Wednesday 25 November, 8:00-9:30am
  *   Adelaide: Wednesday 25 November, 9:00-10:30am
  *
Auckland/Wellington: Wednesday 25 November, 11:30am-1:00pm



To register, please sign up for the Critical Antiquities Network mailing list to receive Zoom links and CAN announcements: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/NtqQC81V0PTQ7gQRJtnfgNsyXZuN?domain=signup.e2ma.net

The Studio for Critical Antiquities is a new initiative of the Critical Antiquities Network, hosted by the Australian National University. This forum is designed to support work in formation for early career scholars working at any kind of interface between antiquity and critical theory. It runs twice a semester alongside the Critical Antiquities Workshop. More information about the Studio (including forthcoming events) can be found here<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/Ow1wC91WPRTx5jxBZHEhNBsqbuUF?domain=criticalantiquities.org>.

This will be our final Studio event for 2026. Thanks to everyone for injecting their energy and ideas in our inaugural year - it's been a blast! We'll be back in 2027.

Here is Giacomo's abstract:

The Tale of the Tribe: The Theory of the Modern Epic

Some of the most important poets of the 20th century– Pound, Zukofksy, HD, Walcott– wrote works that they self-consciously considered to be “epic.” For Pound, this kind of poem always aspired to be the “tale of the tribe;” and many critics have placed the efforts towards the modernist and post-modernist epos in the tradition of “national” poetry in the nineteenth century. But works like The Cantos, A, or Helen in Egypt look back beyond modernity to classical sources. They find in the works of Homer and Dante certain models for how a poem should articulate the nexus of social plenitude and individual experience. The problem for them, is how a genre like this might exist in a world of such intense social fragmentation.

This problem emerges from a very particular reading of classical and medieval epic. The twentieth-century bards were heavily influenced by the Romantic reception of the epic; particularly the Hegelian idea that such poetry was appropriate only for an integral or substantial society, in which law and the individual will were yet to be prised apart. This theory was taken up by Lukacs in his theory of the novel, and has remained a keystone of reception for the modern epic. While critical antiquarians have pointed out that such a vision misrepresents the social complexity of the Greek and Roman worlds, such a misrepresentation remained critically important for modern writers. These poets found in the ancient visions of a social totality a sort of speculative unity towards which they might aim, as a corrective for a world violently divided by class.

In this paper, I want to reconstruct the lineage of the Romantic and post-romantic theory of epic, and show how it operates in one of the major works of modern poetry: Pound’s Cantos. I want to show the ways that Pound tries and fails to overcome what he perceived as the divisions of politics and experience in what we might call the “classical age of class struggle”– the interwar period. I then want to read forward to look at a couple of contemporary Australian writers, whose anti-epics work to contextualise the failures of the modernists like Pound, and raise the question of whether a “tale” can really be told of a “tribe” like our own.


Looking forward to seeing you there!

Tristan Bradshaw
Ben Brown
Tom Geue
Andy Poe