The Maximalist Novel: From Pynchon to Bolaño examines the sprawling, audacious fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, where novels become whole worlds: dense with voices, plots, systems, archives, mysteries, and crises. Reading works associated with the maximalist mode, the course traces how writers use excess not as ornament but as method, building narratives that are encyclopedic, ethically urgent, and formally exuberant.
Across the semester, The Student will consider how these books stretch the limits of the novel to capture social overload, historical catastrophe, media saturation, and the sheer unruliness of contemporary life. From conspiracy and collision to repetition and recursion, the class asks how maximalist fiction turns bewilderment into architecture—and why some of the most demanding novels also become our most expansive acts of imaginative care.
At the center of the course is a guiding question: what can a novel do when one story is no longer …
