One legacy of literary studies’ long love affair with post-structuralism has been a continuing reluctance to engage the concept of totality except in order to contest or deconstruct it. Two exceptions that prove this general trend are capitalism and ecology, and one could argue that it is precisely because both are still arguably acceptable as totalizing concepts that they continue to serve as productive sites of inquiry. Beyond these two instances, however, totality seems to have gone the way of closely related relics of Western metaphysics such as universality, objectivity, and the absolute: a conceptual category to be taken seriously only by the naive, dogmatic, or otherwise insufficiently critical reader.

It is less clear that contemporary literature shares this radical suspicion of totality as a useful concept. Take, for instance, William Vollmann’s decades-long effort to abstract a universal moral calculus from the historical totality of human thinking about violence, or Kenneth Goldsmith’s impossible project of printing and reading aloud the total sum of human knowledge as digitally archived on the internet, or the rise of a global “anthropocene” literature whose geological temporality condenses all of humanity’s species-existence into a single homogeneous force. In fact, a cursory survey suggests that contemporary literature abounds with totalities spatial and temporal, local and global, finite and infinite.

Rather than automatically assuming that such works’ recourse to concepts of totality represents a failure or limitation of thought, this panel seeks to understand on their own terms how such literary totalities are put to use. What sorts of conditions and experiences, in addition to those of economic or biological modernity, lend themselves to totalizing concepts in their literary representation? And how do such works engage with earlier literary-historical periods in which totalizing concepts seemed vital and necessary, and with post-structuralist critiques of totality?

We welcome papers that deal with any aspect or appearance of totalizing systems or concepts in contemporary American and anglophone film and fiction. Examples might include capitalism, globalism, ecology, the anthropocene, "the human experience," digital media technology, ethical systems, mathematics and scientific discourse, etc. What work is left for such concepts to perform in the literature of postmodernity and beyond? Submit 500-word abstracts at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16108