The "little epic," a form Bob and Cameron use to name what McLuhan is doing when his separate media categories fail him and he turns to From Cliché to Archetype: an "opinion" (in the old sense, to "justify the ways of God to people") that explores not heroism but "why humans fail." Where an epic is a single linear story, an epyllion is "always stories, plural" — the same achievement readable at once as failure — so it "recognizes limits" and has discontinuity or "difference" built into it, a notion Cameron says McLuhan came to through Eric Havelock. New to it — start with dialogue 46, where Bob and Cameron set the epic against the epyllion; earlier, in dialogue 03, Bob reads Thomas More's Utopia as an epyllion.
Across the dialogues
Defined against the epic — an epic is one linear story, an epyllion always stories plural with discontinuity built in — and made the form of McLuhan's cliché-to-archetype "opinion" that "justifies the ways of God" by exploring why humans fail
Cameron's definition by contrast — the epic is one linear story, so the epyllion is defined against it as its discontinuous opposite.
"Notice that the difference between an epic and an epyllion is that an epic is a single linear story."
The load-bearing distinction — an epyllion is always stories in the plural, the same achievement readable as failure, so it "recognizes limits" and has discontinuity built in; McLuhan uses it to name the cliché-to-archetype "opinion" that explores why humans fail.
"And an epyllion... is always stories, plural."
Connections
Cameron says McLuhan came to the epyllion — the "little epic" of plural, discontinuous stories — through Eric Havelock.
Bob reads From Cliché to Archetype as an epyllion, and More's Utopia as its Book I / Book II pattern.