Hyperbolic Realism

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2666
A01=Samir Sellami
Against the Day
Author_Samir Sellami
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Category=DSM
comp lit
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
excess
fantastic
historical
long novels
maximalism
philosophy
pomo
postmodern
postwar
uncertain

Product details

  • ISBN 9781501374555
  • Weight: 360g
  • Dimensions: 148 x 226mm
  • Publication Date: 21 Aug 2025
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

Samir Sellami is a literary critic from Berlin, Germany, and founding editor of the Berlin Review.

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