The rationale for organizing this panel can be explained by considering the groundswell of attention surrounding “encyclopedic” and “maximalist” novels. Initially conceived as exceedingly rare (Mendelson 1976; Moretti 1994) or exclusively American (Karl 1985; LeClair 1989), a spate of recent books (Ercolino 2014; Levey 2016; Barrenechea 2016; Letzler 2017; Bergholtz 2024; Ward 2025), special issues (Genre 2021; RSAJournal 2026), and articles have renewed interest in encyclopedic and maximalist forms. If this interest has helped clarify the value of engaging with ambitious fiction in an increasingly interconnected, “info-whelming,” and precarious world, the finer distinctions between maximalism and encyclopedism remain unexplored. What are their generic, formal, and historical differences? In what ways do their imaginative, ethical, cognitive, and political affordances compare? Why, in a time of (mis)information overload and waning attention spans, do writers continue to compose in both modes?

To engage with these questions, this panel features a quartet of emerging and established scholars. After situating the panel within existing debates, Benjamin Bergholtz begins to move beyond them by synthesizing Ward’s analysis of totality and encyclopedism (2025) with his own theorization of maximalism as an aesthetic response to globalization (2025). Discussing novels by Flaubert, Teju Cole, and Namwali Serpell, Bergholtz argues that maximalism and encyclopedism are related but distinct phenomena whose affordances are intersecting but independent. While maximalist novels illustrate and embody sweeping contemporary problems (global capitalism, climate change, neocolonialism), encyclopedic works emphasize the epistemological challenges (information overload, conflicting perspectives, post-truth) of addressing or even understanding these problems.

After Bergholtz discusses distinctions between maximalism and encyclopedism, Kiron Ward asks how their “family resemblances” shed light on one of the contemporary’s most abject genres: “slop.” Defined by Read (2024) as “a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence,” “slop” is writing about which we are all increasingly paranoid. But “slop” can also be understood as a by-product of contemporary encyclopedic discourse, since Wikipedia is among the most important sources in the training of LLMs (Gertner 2023). While encyclopedism and maximalism are distinct but related modes, “slop” manifests a different way for the two modes to relate. Drawing on Olga Tokarczuk’s 2019 Nobel Lecture, Ben Lerner’s 2023 “The Hoffman Wobble,” and Letzler’s argument about “attentional modulation” in the mega-novel (2017), Ward considers the challenges that “slop” presents to contemporary fiction.

Next, Ali Dehdarirad addresses the postwar significance of maximalism and encyclopedism through an analysis of short stories by Borges and Pynchon, on the one hand, and massive novels by William Vollmann and Garth Hallberg, on the other. Attending to the possible overlaps between these two terms, Dehdarirad engages with recent revisions of maximalism as an epistemological approach — one that values the pursuit of detail as a means of fostering empathy, regardless of a text’s length. Drawing on the cognitive process of “exformation” (Nørretranders), Dehdarirad argues that while all the above-mentioned works contribute to a new understanding of maximalism, not all qualify as encyclopedic writing. If an encyclopedia seeks to encompass privileged knowledge of the world, maximalist texts embrace, if not rely on, seemingly useless, banal information.

Finally, Yonina Hoffman argues that we should (re)define the encyclopedic novel in terms of its multiplotted narrative structure. Building on recent debates about complexity, narrative structure, and narrative cognition, Hoffman argues that encyclopedic novels follow at least three disparate focalizing characters, whose plot lines do not entirely overlap spatially. This “multiplot,” “multistrand,” or “braided” (Bancroft 2018) structure sets up shifting focalizations that readers follow laterally, looking for connections on multiple textual levels to cohere otherwise disparate strands. Considering the readerly dynamics of predictive processing studied by Kukkonen and Caracciolo alongside the fundamentals of systems theory, Hoffman argues that encyclopedic novels train readers to adopt systemic, rather than linear, forms of narrative cognition.

Building on the success of panels organized by Bergholtz in 2024 and 2025, this panel addresses some of the contemporary’s most vexing genres, epistemological questions, and political problems. To engage with the diverse interests of the panel's audience, 20 minutes will be reserved for Q&A.