Maximalist Novel

Stefano Ercolino is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He taught at Underwood International College, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester, UK, a former Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University, USA, and DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow in the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 (2014).

• List of Figures Acknowledgements The Maximalist NovelIntroduction. Maximalist Paradigms1. “Art of Excess”: The Systems Novel2. “A Paradoxical Form”: The Mega-Novel3. “In the Eyes of the World”: The Modern EpicPart OneChapter I. LengthChapter II. Encyclopedic Mode1. An “Encyclopedic Novel”?2. An Encyclopedic “Genre”?3. The Encyclopedic ModeChapter III. Dissonant Chorality1. Chorality2. PolyphonyMinimalism/MaximalismChapter IV. Diegetic ExuberanceChapter V. Completeness1. Structural Practices of the Maximalist Novel1.1 Circular Geometries1.2 Temporal Architectures1.3 Conceptual Structures1.3.1 Leitmotiv1.3.2 Myth1.3.3 Intertextual FormsChapter VI. Narratorial OmniscienceChapter VII. Paranoid ImaginationInternal Dialectic. Chaos-Function/Cosmos-FunctionPart TwoChapter VIII. Intersemioticity Chapter IX. Ethical Commitment1. “Chemically Troubled Times”: Representing AddictionChapter X. Hybrid RealismBibliographyIndex

There have been attempts to define the nebulous genre of ‘big books’ before, but none so successful or analytically astute … Ercolino has taken full advantage not only of characterizing but also of naming the putative genre of the maximalist novel … I suspect that criticism on big books will soon be filled with references to the ‘maximalist novel.’ For this we are indebted to Ercolino’s study which makes a significant and important contribution to the criticism on late twentieth- and twenty-first century narrative fictions.