At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in New Orleans, LA (January 9-12, 2025), I will be speaking on a panel discussing Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block. I have included the information about the panel and a tentative abstract for the paper I will be presenting below.

65. Hypergraphia and Hypographia: Literary Maximalism and the Literature of Writer’s Block

Thursday, January 9, 2025, 1:45-3:00 pm, Windsor (Hilton Riverside New Orleans)

Presiding: Benjamin Bergholtz (Louisiana Tech U) and Aaron Colton (Emory U)

Presentations:
1. “‘No!—But I Must’: The Blocked Writer in Maximalist Fiction,” Benjamin Bergholtz (Louisiana Tech U) 
2. “The Craft of Writer’s Block: Autofiction, Process, and Pedagogy,” Aaron Colton (Emory U)
3. “Megatextual Kinaesthetics: The Wanderer above the Sea of Elden Ring,” Bradley Fest (Hartwick C) 
4. “Wallace’s Maximalism: Other-Flood and Self-Blockage,” Yonina Hoffman (US Merchant Marine Acad.)

Elden Ring, v. 1.09.1 (Tokyo: Bandai Namco, 2022), PlayStation 4, screenshot by author.

“Megatextual Kinaesthetics: The Wanderer above the Sea of Elden Ring“

In the twenty-first century, the maximalist impulse evident in the big, ambitious novel of the twentieth century has expanded toward the creation of massively unreadable works across media, what Fest has elsewhere called megatexts. From experimental literary projects, to popular forms, to transmedia corporate intellectual property, megatexts abound in the twenty-first century and their presence in both avant-garde and corporate cultural production signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the neoliberal era. Perhaps the most paradigmatic instance of this emerging form is the massive, open-world video game requiring hundreds of hours of playtime to traverse. In the video-game megatext, we see a form striving to create worlds, to build spaces large enough to feel comparable to our own.

In his talk, Fest will focus on FromSoftware’s blockbuster 2022 game Elden Ring as not only a paradigmatic video-game megatext but also the kind of sensorial-conceptual or theoretical text that Patrick Jagoda has recently suggested experimental games can be. Fest will argue that Elden Ring’s open world is an affective, bodily, material sensorium that presents to its players something like what big data feels like, allowing players to experience a haptics of hyperarchivalism, a spatiality of the database. In this way, rather than some monumentally time-sucking waste, Elden Ring might itself constitute a moment of respite, contemplation, and critical engagement with respect to the network society, a moment where the digital realities of contemporaneity, in all their hypermediated and interconnected totality might be critically felt, even if that feeling only occurs as the sensation of a concept.

For previous essays of mine on megatexts and unreadable texts, see:

“Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.’”

“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

“Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”

“Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”

“The Megatext and Neoliberalism.”

“The Time of Megatexts: Dark Accumulation and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar.”