The Star Wars Trilogy and the Epic Tradition

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The Star Wars Trilogy and the Epic Tradition

The Star Wars Trilogy seems to embody within the form of cinema many of the classic elements of epic. In tracing the English epic from the Homeric odes to Tom Jones on the large screen and observing the various forms of epic development in response to changing cultural needs, it shows how the Star Wars Trilogy shares the purposes and cultural functions as well as the devices of traditional epic. And by connecting these films to epic, I hope to illuminate how the evolving genre of epic may assume the cinematic form.

Thomas E. Maresca calls the epic tradition "a precise body of subject matter and form capable of manifesting itself in many guises" (Maresca 26). The trilogy must match its guise of sci-fi/action movie to the structures of epic such as a closed linguistic system, a symmetry to its parts and an epic manner or style. Second, the narrative subject should be large and heroic, one where the cosmos itself is the stake. Or is Star Wars a work "Slight of Subject" as Pope referred to his own mock epic, The Rape of the Lock (I: line 5)? Lastly, if epic concerns itself with "the City of man in this world," and if epic serves to both formulate and preserve civilization's knowledge and beliefs as central cultural positions, how does the trilogy inform "the condition of human life" and what influences are demonstrated in the film narrative? This essay will offer evidence that the Star Wars Trilogy is potentially a new manifestation of the epic tradition.

The epic is by definition long, and the three Star Wars films take over six hours to view. The first film, subtitled A New Hope, is listed as episode IV, implying three preceding chapt...

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...etry and Prose of Alexander Pope.Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

Editor's Notes

*That is, different objects and characters are understood to stand for an idea -- Guyon, the Knight in Book II, for example, represents temperance, the virture he is pursuing. Acrasia, the villianess of that Book, represents lust and excess. The use of allegory like this probably developed from the belief that the best works of art instructed while they entertained. Allegory provides a way to do both.

**To be palindromatic, a work must mirror itself. Star Wars has many scenes which reflect one another: Luke and Leia's swing to safety in both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, the Cantina scene and Jabba's Palace, R2D2 and C3P0's trek across the desert, Luke and Leia's holographic messages and Ben and Luke's Jedi mind tricks.

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