realism

Beyond Maximalism: Resolving the Novelistic Incompatibilities of Realism, Paranoia, Omniscience, and Encyclopedism through Electronic Literature. 

In The Maximalist Novel, Ercolino defines a type of novel that displays multiform maximizing and hypertrophic tension. He lists Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997), Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), and Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) as examples of the term, and classifies the maximalist novel using ten elements: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. While Ercolino’s ten elements accurately identify and classify a significant novel form that has emerged, I argue that these elements are incompatible with one another, which has resulted in criticisms of maximalist novels, as well as a number of maximalist novelists to abandon the form. While Ercolino argues that these incompatibilities represent an ‘internal dialectic’ of the genre, I argue that this is too conflicting to be stable as a novelistic form. These incompatibilities include the incompatibility of multiple (hybrid) realisms, the incompatibility of paranoid imagination with ethical commitment, and the incompatibilities of narratorial omniscience and an encyclopedic mode with a persuasive realism. By examining contemporary fictional works written by previously maximalist novelists, I reassess Ercolino’s ten elements in order to identify the reasons why certain authors have moved beyond the limits of his definition. In so doing, I compare and contrast Ercolino’s ‘maximalist novel’ with Woods’s ‘hysterical realism,’ and Johnston’s ‘novel of information multiplicity.’ Using the Franzen and Smith corpuses as examples, this paper speculates on the future form of the novel as it progresses into the 21st Century. From this literary interrogation, I apply these conclusions to my digital creative practice by developing the digital novel The Perfect Democracy (funded by the Australia Council for the Arts). This work takes as its subject the entire population of contemporary Australia. Such a vast subject is impossible to represent in a work of fiction. The whole work is presented as a 3D frame-like artefact, that can be navigated as a whole, allowing readers to be presented with a multivalent, broad-canvas novel, while resolving the paradoxical issues identified in my interrogation of Ercolino. I propose that this will be achieved by utilising Calvino’s Six Memos. Images of Australian currency will be used as a structural device to remove weight by representing the whole society from the richest to the poorest in the quickest way possible, and a multitude of simultaneous digital writing formats and voices will be used to precisely depict characterisation. 

Works CitedCalvino, I. (1988) Six Memos For The Next Millennium, trans. P. Creagh, London: Vintage, 1988.Johnston, J. (1998) Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Smith, Z. (2001) ‘This is how it feels to me’, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan (accessed 18 November, 2018).Wood, J. (2001) ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’, The New Republic Online. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman (accessed 18 November, 2018).

On Amy Elias’s view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott’s early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.

In his review of Martin Paul Eve’s Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno, Julius Greve situates this new book on Pynchon within the upheavals produced by speculative realism and contemporary discourses on materialism. In doing so, Greve reminds us of what was always already the case: the literary-philosophical relevance of Pynchon, which turns out to be all the more inescapable in contemporary political climates.

Source: Author's abstract

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. (Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gaming)