Enjoy an explanation of fictional encyclopedism by researcher, professor, and author Pierpaolo Antonello. Critics have observed that an “encyclopedic complex” or “encyclopedic impulse,” frequently marked by irony and satire, has informed both modernist and postmodernist literature, from Joyce to Pynchon. While usually linked to the vast architecture of maximalist novels or opere-mondo, this lineage also runs through short, fragmentary, and eccentric texts that resist clear generic classification. In such works, the encyclopedic is refracted through epigrammatic form, with flashes of taxonomic excess, where the discursive frameworks of the sciences are repurposed for arbitrary, imaginary, and parodic schemes of classifications. This lecture examines this genealogy through intermedial instances of fictional encyclopedism, concentrating on Leo Lionni’s Parallel Botany (1976) and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981). Both works conjoin scientific discourse, visual art, and imaginary taxonomy, and interrogate the fantastic through parodic and satirical registers. They exemplify not only the ekphrastic tendencies of contemporary encyclopedism but also a form of “rational fantastic” that exceeds Tzvetan Todorov’s genre definition, reconfiguring encyclopedism as an open, generative aesthetic: a combinatory mechanism for the invention of possible worlds.
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