At a time when Shklovsky in Russia and Lubbock in Great Britain were successfully banning metaphysics from literary criticism, Lukács' Theory of the Novel appeared as a late and stubborn attempt to reconstruct the most characteristic genre of modern literature from pure thought. To young Lukács, the theory of any genre coincides with its history, which, in true German fashion, he believes begins with the inimitable art of Greece…. Lukács does not tolerate any history of the mind before that of Greece; the Greeks are the nation whose inevitable destiny in the intellectual development of mankind it was to give birth to the great "forms" of the creative mind: the epic, tragedy, and philosophy. In the dawn of history we perceive the absolute immanence of the heroic age of Homer; as time progresses, however, integral substance withers (entweicht) more and more until, finally, the irremediable development toward philosophical alienation results in the most rigid opposition of meaning and being confirmed by the unfortunate transcendence of Platonic thought.
Tragedy, according to young Lukács, develops precisely between the time of the great epic and Plato. While the epic is still fortunate enough to be able to deal with the magnificent essence of life, tragedy (in a moment of progressive alienation) has no other chance but to question reality. "The great epic gives form to the extensive totality of life; the drama to the intensive totality of essence." From these assumptions Lukács derives a closed ontology of the epic and tragic genres; unavoidably, the epic is empirical because it aims at the particular, at the given condition of the world; drama, on the other hand, lives in the world of what ought to be, in a tension toward the future. (pp. 201-02)
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