According to theorists like Lukács and Bakhtin, the epic is a genre that emerges from a stable and coherent social body. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was far from stable or socially cohesive, and yet a surprising number of significant artists of this period could be described as having taken up the epic form. This course will interrogate the modern—and modernist—epic as a critical and theoretical problem in the context of American literature. What were the possibilities and limitations of the epic for figures including Frank Norris, D.W. Griffith, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams? How did they understand their participation in the epic, within their various poetic, narrative and filmic media? Following the socially-oriented theorists of the genre, what can we conclude about the meaning of the epic in the context of the modern social vision?