Call for Papers

Teaching Literary Maximalism

This volume in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series seeks essays describing innovative approaches to teaching big, ambitious texts: books that present a higher level of difficulty and are often—but not always—quite long. Alternatively theorized as encyclopedic narrative, the mega-novel, the modern epic, and the maximalist novel, such texts create obvious challenges in the classroom. Their length risks intimidating all but the most audacious students; their often-sweeping spatiotemporal scope can be immersive but also overwhelming; their detailed cultural and historical references can impede access; and their formal complexity appears designed to frustrate a reader’s search for clarity. At a time of waning attention spans and endless distraction, devoting weeks of one’s class to a work like Don Quixote, Gravity’s Rainbow, or White Teeth can feel like a recipe for pedagogical failure. Yet, as the critical cachet of such novels demonstrates, maximalist texts are among the most celebrated across literary traditions and languages, and the challenge of teaching them in the contemporary classroom is matched by the value of introducing students to their imaginative and cultural significance.

Though conversations about literary maximalism frequently focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this collection takes a broad view of the phenomenon: we seek those teaching across disciplines and linguistic traditions as well as historical periods and geographic contexts. Thus, we invite contributions on foundational texts in and outside Anglophone contexts, such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Mann’s The Magic Mountain; contemporary global novels, such as Bolaño’s 2666, de Palol’s Garden of Seven Twilights, Knausgaard’s My Struggle (vols. 1–6), and Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob; canonical works within the Anglophone tradition, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and Wallace’s Infinite Jest; less celebrated ones, such as Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Stein’s The Making of the Americans, and Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling; and novels in the growing tradition of postcolonial maximalism, such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Makumbi’s Kintu, James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Serpell’s The Old Drift. Finally, we are interested in approaches to teaching works that fall outside the “novel” genre, whether they precede that designation (e.g., The Tale of Genji; The Shahnameh); operate in a different genre (e.g., long poetry); or involve new media (e.g., massive, open-world video games). Contributions that address multiple texts are also welcome.

Regardless of the object(s) under analysis, the editors are interested in essays that offer teachers a wide range of methods for grappling with the risks and rewards of assigning maximalist works. To this end, we seek contributions from across disciplines and teaching contexts. In addition to literary studies, we invite proposals from colleagues in comparative literature, cultural studies, history, philosophy, religious studies, media and game studies, digital humanities, and translation studies. If you can write honestly about what has—or has not—worked when teaching these massive tomes, then we are interested in your work.

Potential topics for essays include

• Problems of syllabus formation: length, depth, breadth, diversity, coverage
• Different approaches to difficulty in the classroom: motivating student interest in specialized vocabulary, arcane references, subtle interconnections, and so on
• The payoffs of teaching maximalist texts: ethical, political, imaginative, cognitive
• The affordances of different theoretical or generic approaches: maximalist, encyclopedic, mega-novel, hysterical realism, the (modern) epic, and so on
• Enabling student engagement with the large critical corpora around individual maximalist texts
• Maximalism taught within different frameworks: US versus global; contemporary versus transhistorical; Anglophone versus comparative
• Designing assignments that balance depth and breadth
• Information overload in an era of endless distraction
• Maximalism in relation to seriality
• Teaching in relation to nonnormative depictions of space and time
• Approaches to teaching maximalist literary form
• Approaches to abridgment of longer works
• Pragmatic pedagogical tools: lesson plans, activities, use of technology, etc.

Abstract proposals (300–500 words) and a CV should be emailed by 15 December 2025 to the editors, Benjamin Bergholtz and Yonina Hoffman, at MaximalistLit@gmail.com. In your CV, please include information about the context of your teaching (e.g., R1, SLAC, HBCU, military academy, community college, prison education programs, etc.): we wish to represent a diversity of pedagogical situations as well as a diversity of texts and topics. Following peer review of the table of contents, completed essays of approximately 2,000–3,000 words will be due at a date to be determined.