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What comes after postmodernism in literature?
Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's
Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's
2666 - their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty - which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I
1. Realism on an Expanded Canvas
2. Notes on Hyperbole
Part II
3. The Maximalist Novel: Lovers & Haters
4. Anthropophagic Intertextuality
5. The Visible and the Invisible
6. Flat Fictionality
7. Sed Tamen Effabor
8. Ekphrasis Beyond Imagination
Part III
9. Slow Adventures
10. The Labor of Figuration
Epilogue: A Fifth Concept of Reality
References
Index
About the author
Samir Sellami is a literary critic and, together with Tobias Haberkorn, founding editor of the Berlin Review. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and media studies from the University of Perpignan and the Federal Fluminense University in Nitéroi, Brazil. His research interests include post-avantgarde writing in the Americas, critiques of strong narrativity, aesthetic autodidacticism, and the intersectionality of genre, affect, and form.
Summary
What comes after postmodernism in literature?
Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.
Additional text
Samir Sellami writes with brilliant clarity and makes difficult arguments easy to follow. Philosophers and critical theorists should study his techniques.
