Culture of connection, paranoia, burnout society, and poetics of the novel as an open encyclopedia

Abstract

In the culture of connection, the feeling of excess – information, files and connections – is made more present. Such extraliterary factors influence the constitution of literary discourse, as it presents Italo Calvino (1990), in Six memos of the next millennium, when he discusses the novel as an open encyclopedia. The adjective "open" linked to the noun "encyclopedia" establishes the relationship between yesterday and today, between modernity and hypermodernity in the Big Tech culture. The identification of the polyandric aspect of contemporary narrative by Carlos Ceia (2007) also enriches the possibilities of reading the poetics of the novel as an open encyclopedia, as seen in the poetics of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Therefore, in this essay, we aim at presenting social and historical aspects of the information age that helps us an understanding of the poetics of the novel as an open encyclopedia.