Other perspectives
There has been considerable debate about the nature and function of the encyclopedic novel since Mendelson's exposition of the concept. Hillary A. Clark attributes to this type of discourse the importance of ordering the information which the writer discovers and retrieves. [9] Moreover, Clark points out that encyclopedic texts have a long history, from the Renaissance Divine Comedy of Dante to Ezra Pound's modernist The Cantos . She explains that the urge to order the sum of all knowledge grew exponentially during the Renaissance and that by the 20th century we see writers such as Pound and James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake is an example of an encyclopedic novel) simply recycling narratives. The encyclopedist's essential job regardless of the type of discourse, is to gather, recycle, and restate. The encyclopedic writer "returns to the role of the medieval scribe … reading and copying the already known, the popular, as well as the esoteric," and hence the encyclopedic novel assumes an almost "anti-creative" function. [10]
The illusion of encyclopedism experienced by the reader of such a novel might represent the author's exploration of the assumptions and practices embodied in the production of a real encyclopedia. Along these lines, a post-structuralist analysis of the encyclopedic novel sees it as critical of encyclopedism, [11] the ostensible goal of which is to capture the sum of all human knowledge. This critique suggests that the encyclopedic project is "tainted by its association with master narratives" [12] and that it reinforces the "illusion of a totalizing system" [13] of knowledge. Encyclopedic novels in this view are commentaries on the limits of such narratives and systems. Given that the aura of encyclopedism in a work of fiction is necessarily an illusion, it points to a failure—a "failure" which may align with a novelistic intent to "highlight the illusory basis of 'total knowledge'". [14] From this perspective, encyclopedic fiction suggests that "we should not systematically encyclopedize but seek more 'open' approaches to knowledge". [11] On the other hand, Gustave Flaubert's encyclopedic Bouvard et Pécuchet appears to achieve an opposite goal: in his relentless encyclopedic presentation of "facts and theories", the two main characters, Bouvard and Pécuchet, appear to be so absorbed in a world of knowledge, of having to gain knowledge, of needing to put knowledge to practical purpose, that Flaubert appears to suggest the civilization they inhabit lacks creativity and art. [15]
While an encyclopedia is a factual reference work, a novel stands in opposition to it as a "literary nonreferential narrative". [16] One critical review questions why a novelist would paradoxically reference a fictional universe, and what literary purpose is served by the proliferation of the "junk text" that is often a carrier of the encyclopedic conceit. When excessive real-world data is presented to the reader, the author's purpose is unclear: those readers who already know the material will find it superfluous, and those who do not know it may find that it adds nothing of interest to the text. Giving examples of "junk text" in encyclopedic fiction, the review cites "the pseudo-scientific cetology chapter" in Moby-Dick and "minor-character chatter about art and economics" in William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975). Yet, a defining characteristic of the encyclopedic novel is the presentation of unwanted or unnecessary information. Such writing "terminate[s] focused attention", and is in danger of boring the reader. [17] One view of the encyclopedic novel's method, therefore, is that it requires the reader to practice modulating their attention to the text, bringing more consciousness to the act of filtering the important from the tangential. [18] Encyclopedic novels such as Infinite Jest or House of Leaves include extensive and sometimes nonsensical footnotes referencing a variety of in-universe and out-of-universe subjects, thus directly adopting the conventions of academic writing while also creating a layer of "cruft" that the reader must actively parse in pursuit of the core narrative. [19]
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
House of Leaves is the debut novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. A bestseller, it has been translated into a number of languages, and is followed by a companion piece, The Whalestoe Letters.
Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät, which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".
Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life and art.
Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's reelection. Through flashbacks by its characters, who have lived the sixties in their youth, the story accounts for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describes the traits of the "fascistic Nixonian repression" and its War on Drugs that clashed with it; and it articulates the slide and transformation that occurred in U.S. society from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical novel by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism.
Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden (1992), which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library (1999), and Hegirascope (1995), amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.
Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally "difficult to define with any sort of precision." It experiments with the conventions of literature, including boundaries of genres and styles; for example, it can be written in the form of prose narratives or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse. It may also incorporate art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was traditionally handwritten, the digital age has seen an exponential use of writing experimental works with word processors.
Ancient Evenings is a 1983 historical novel by American author Norman Mailer. Set in ancient Egypt and dealing with the lives of the characters Menenhetet One and Meni, the novel received mixed reviews. Reviewers noted the historical research that went into writing it and considered Mailer successful at conveying the nature of ancient Egyptian life. However, they also criticized the novel's narration and questioned its literary merit. Ancient Evenings has been compared to the work of the poet James Merrill and the novelist Thomas Pynchon, as well as to Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost (1991). Some have suggested that its opening passage is its strongest part. Ancient Evenings served as an inspiration for the artist Matthew Barney's operatic film River of Fundament (2014).
Harper Perennial is a paperback imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins Publishers.
Metahistorical romance is a term describing postmodern historical fiction, defined by Amy J. Elias in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Elias defines metahistorical romance as a form of historical fiction continuing the legacy of historical romance inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott but also having ties to contemporary postmodern historiography. A metahistorical romance does not merely use history for the setting and events of the novel, but forces the reader to reexamine history, and their own view of it. It accomplishes this by reinterpreting historical events, writing about ordinary people, crossing between various time periods, or bending history in other ways. In Elias's usage, romance does not signify novels focused on marriage and love, but instead a style in which past events are "romanticized" and reinterpreted.
"An Outpost of Progress" is a short story written in July 1896 by Joseph Conrad, drawing on his own experience in Belgian Congo. It was published in the magazine Cosmopolis in 1897 and was later collected in Tales of Unrest in 1898.
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story ", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance". Such "romances" should not be confused with the genre fiction romance novel, which focuses on romantic love. M. H. Abrams and Walter Scott have argued that a novel is a fiction narrative that displays a realistic depiction of the state of a society, while the romance encompasses any fictitious narrative that emphasizes marvellous or uncommon incidents. Works of fiction that include marvellous or uncommon incidents are also novels, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Fictional encyclopaedism is a term used in literary studies to refer to a style of fiction writing where an author amasses an exhaustive amount of detail about a fictional world to include in or prepare for writing a work of fiction. It is not to be confused with fictional encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Galactica, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Systems novel is a literary genre named by Tom LeClair in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, and explored further in LeClair's 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. LeClair used systems theory to critique novels by authors including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Ursula Le Guin. Citing Fritjof Capra's description of systems theory as a "new vision of reality" LeClair invoked ideas from thinkers such as James Lovelock, Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hofstadter to analyse how the novels in question depicted processes and relationships within social, cultural, economic and political systems. LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect."
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