Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block

Bergholtz, Benjamin; Bergholtz, Benjamin

While hypergraphia (the compulsion to write) and hypographia (writer’s block) have previously been considered together as psychological conditions, their literary manifestations have yet to be analyzed in tandem. Nonetheless, many celebrated hypergraphic writers––Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Marlon James—have either dealt with writer’s block or thematized it in their work. What, this panel asks, do these contrasting conditions have to do with one another? How might they relate as critical or aesthetic tools? And how might they form responses to historical forces—late capitalism, globalization, the “Program Era” (McGurl 2009), and the “Conglomerate Era” (Sinykin 2023)—whose scope and complexity simultaneously bewilder and provoke art?

Following Stefano Ercolino’s The Maximalist Novel (2014), maximalism has received an upswell of scholarly attention. First conceived as an exceedingly rare (Mendelson 1976; Moretti 1994) or exclusively American genre (Karl 1985; LeClair 1989), a spate of recent books (e.g., Levey 2016; Barrenechea 2016; Letzler 2017), special issues, and articles have expanded interest in maximalism’s formal and global range. By contrast, scholarship on writer’s block remains scant. The most well-cited work, Mike Rose’s Writer’s Block: The Cognitive Dimension (1984), originates in writing studies and focuses predominantly on undergraduates. Within literary studies, the only monograph is Zachary Leader’s 1991 literary-cultural history, Writer’s Block. To date, the fictional blocked writer—a fixture in metafiction, autofiction, and the Künstlerroman—has yet to be examined deeply.

To explore the critical and aesthetic interplay between hypergraphia and hypographia, this panel features papers from a quartet of emerging and established scholars. Co-organizing the panel are Benjamin Bergholtz and Aaron Colton, whose forthcoming books—Swallowing a World (Nebraska, 2024) and Writing Through Writer’s Block (Iowa, under contract), respectively— reimagine conversations about the obsessive and the obstructed writer.

To begin the panel, Bergholtz discusses how a fundamental tension within the maximalist novel—its drive toward inclusivity and comprehensiveness, on the one hand, and its awareness of the limitations of this drive, on the other—is often concentrated in the figure of the blocked writer. Discussing fictional blocked writers in maximalist texts by Rushdie, James, and Luiselli, Bergholtz demonstrates how these figures function as self-reflexive reminders of the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic risks of trying to represent an entire world. Rather than opposites, Bergholtz thus concludes, the hypergraphic and hypographic writer are dialectical twins.

Following Bergholtz, Aaron Colton analyzes how fictions about writer’s block contend with a subject thought fundamental to writing big, maximalist books: Romantic inspiration. Focusing on fictional blocked writers who blame their blockage on the absence of inspiration, Colton argues that novelists such as Bernard Malamud, Sheila Heti, and David Foster Wallace deploy such figures to reestablish composition as ordinary labor. That is, through negative illustrations of blocked writers who await Romantic inspiration, these authors suggest that writing does not flow from a metaphysical source, that the author is not a sacred vessel, and that writing is but a tangible craft.

After the first two papers discuss hypographic writers grappling with hypergraphia, Bradley Fest expands our understanding of hypographia as a cultural condition by discussing what he has elsewhere called the megatext. Perhaps the most paradigmatic instance of this emerging form, Fest suggests, is the massive, open-world video game requiring hundreds of hours of playtime. Focusing specifically on FromSoftware’s 2022 game Elden Ring, Fest argues that the video-game megatext can constitute itself as a moment of respite and critical engagement with respect to the network society. By immersing players in an affective, bodily, material sensorium, video-game megatexts, he argues, create moments where the digital, hypermediated, and interconnected realities of the present can be critically felt.

Lastly, Yonina Hoffman considers David Foster Wallace’s career-long struggles and self-theorizing regarding both hyper- and hypographia. Drafts of Infinite Jest—revealing previously unanalyzed references to Harold Bloom and his psychoanalytic forebears—illuminate Wallace’s desire to be “flooded” with the influence of the other. With a flooding of otherness, Wallace sought to defeat hypographia, court novelty, and refuse his own inauthentic and automatic habits. Wallace’s thematic opposition of paralysis to mindlessness, Hoffman argues, links athletics to writing craft and sheds new light on the psychology of imitation and intertextuality among hypergraphic writers.

With papers addressing popular authors (e.g., Rushdie, James, Luiselli, Heti, Wallace) and recently contested subjects (autofiction, metafiction, transmedia, globalization), this panel will appeal to a broad range of scholars. It will also build on the success of “Mapping the Maximalist Novel” and “Twenty-First Century Forms,” roundtable panels hosted by Bergholtz and Fest at last year’s convention. To engage with the diverse interests of the panel's audience, 20 minutes will be reserved for Q&A.

65 Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block: Calls for Papers