REALLY, REALLY BIG BOOKS: A READING LIST

[Dave Monroe]

The Maximalist Novel:
>From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666

The Maximalist Novel sets out to define a new genre of contemporary
fiction that developed in the United States from the early 1970s, and
then gained popularity in Europe in the early twenty-first century.

The maximalist novel has a very strong symbolic and morphological
identity. Ercolino sets out ten particular elements which define and
structure it as a complex literary form: length, an encyclopedic mode,
dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial
omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical
commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten characteristics are common
to all of the seven works that centre his discussion: Gravity's
Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace,
Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by
the Babette Factory.

Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in
every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the
maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken
singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern
novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their
co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them
fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-maximalist-novel-9781623562915/

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> DOES SIZE MATTER? DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK
>
> http://lithub.com/really-really-big-books-a-reading-list/
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l