CfP Special Issue no. 37 - (Re)Reading Encyclopedic Narratives in the Digital Age

Call for Papers: (Re)Reading Encyclopedic Narratives in the Digital Age

RSAJournal 37 (September 2026)

Guest editors: Giorgio Mariani (Sapienza University of Rome), Ali Dehdarirad (Sapienza University of Rome), Sascha Pöhlmann (TU Dortmund University)

In an era of increasingly pervasive digital media and various online platforms, our reading habits have been constantly changing with a general tendency toward shorter texts rather than expansive literary works that demand substantial time and intellectual engagement. To name but a few canonical writers in the latter tradition, we can think of William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and, in the following generation, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, and Mark Z. Danielewski. In light of the exponential spread of Internet culture and epistemological relativism in the U.S. and beyond, it is worth asking how/if the big, ambitious novels relate to readers in the new millennium. If microfiction appears to be “a perfect match” (Murray 2023) for our age of rapidly shrinking attention spans, one wonders: “does the maximalist novel still matter?” (Clark 2022).

Considering the generally celebratory understandings of the large, complex novels, such as those by Edward Mendelson (1976), Tom LeClair (1989), and David Letzler (2017), on the one hand, and a more cautious stance toward them, as proposed by Stephen Burn (2007), Luc Herman and Petrus Van Ewijk (2009), and Stefano Ercolino (2014), on the other, these works are characterized by the challenge of all-encompassing representation while simultaneously being skeptical of it. Whereas for some scholars such erudite books “master […] the methods of fiction, and the reader” (LeClair 1989) by exceeding the time’s literary conventions, others see them as marked by an intrinsic limitation, indicating “the fragility of the human enterprise” (Burn 2015). Complicating the picture have been readerly attention within twenty-first-century digital environments and a growing inclination toward audiobooks, fictional podcasts, and the so-called Instapoetry. At the same time, several critics have suggested that even in microfiction it is possible to recognize much aesthetic effect if it is read with due attention (Shapard 2012). Finally, and very importantly, the encyclopedic form also undoubtedly merits critique in
its (tacit or explicit) white male positionality, making it imperative to reflect on this dominance and/or provide a complicating counterpoint to it.

This special issue aims to feature a collection of scholarly articles that contribute to a multifaceted, interdisciplinary perspective on the apparently paradoxical status of the big, far-reaching narratives as well as their significance and/or appeal to both literary experts and general readers in the twenty-first century. Scholars from different areas of American literature and culture are invited to reflect on whether, and in what ways, the encyclopedic novel continues to engage and challenge the readers in the “Age of Distraction” (Gurdon 2019).

Topics for consideration may include, but are not limited to:

• The cultural and critical relevance of encyclopedic novels in the era of digital media
• Cognitive perspectives on encyclopedic narratives and their relation to today’s world
• Encyclopedic fiction versus microfiction
• Encyclopedic texts and the book publishing market
• Revisitation of critical concepts concerning encyclopedic novels
• Encyclopedic fiction and postpostmodernism
• Encyclopedic narratives in the era of post-truth
• Encyclopedic novels, planetarity, and the Anthropocene
• Encyclopedic texts and gender dynamics

 

Submission guidelines and deadlines

Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short bio of about 100 words, to all three editors (giorgio.mariani@uniroma1.it; ali.dehdarirad@uniroma1.it; sascha.poehlmann@tu-dortmund.de) by June 30, 2025. Contributors will be notified by July 15, 2025. If accepted, final submissions will be due by September 30, 2025.