Against the (Father’s) Grain

Women’s Encyclopedism in the Contemporary US Novel

Abstract

The term “encyclopedic” describes unusually large-scale works of fiction that emulate the scope and structure of an encyclopedia, incorporating a broad range of knowledge, disciplines and cultural references to attempt a comprehensive portrait of a particular “world” or era. Unsurprisingly, and in line with dominant ideas about rationality and intellectual authority, since the 1970s scholars have largely identified fictional encyclopedism with the work of white male writers, overlooking the ways women and writers of color have engaged with it. This paper examines four novels by women – Leslie M. Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), C.E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (2016), Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) – that challenge conventional definitions and expectations about encyclopedic fiction in that, while they engage deeply with the history and practice of encyclopedic thought in the US at the level of content, this engagement generally concentrates on a single topic or area of knowledge and shapes their form only marginally, if at all. Collectively, these novels hold a mirror to encyclopedism from liminal positions to which women, along with other minorities, have long been relegated within US society. The resulting images of US history and culture highlight the link of encyclopedism to colonial practices (Silko), expose its role in laying and upholding the country’s patriarchal foundations (Morgan), trace its legacy in educational institutions whose structure and curricula still reproduce imperial hierarchies (Pessl), and reclaim it as a feminist aesthetic that confronts ongoing discrimination and oppression against women in the contemporary age (Ellmann). I use father-daughter dynamics – around which encyclopedism manifests in each novel – to anchor my analysis of how encyclopedic writing can expose and challenge the ways patriarchy and colonialism have suppressed non-dominant knowledge forms and constrained women’s intellectual life, undermining their confidence and autonomy.