This article seeks to define a new genre of the contemporary novel: the maximalist novel. It is an aesthetically hybrid genre that developed in the United States in the early 1970s and then spread to Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The aim of this article is to stake out a new conceptual territory that will contribute to a re-shaping of both the traditional view of the literary postmodern and the understanding of the development of the novel in the second half of the twentieth century. The maximalist novel has a strong symbolic and morphological identity, with ten elements that define and structure it as a highly complex literary form: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten categories are common to the seven novels discussed in this essay: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by the Babette Factory. Although these ten features are not all present in the same form or intensity in each of these texts, they are decisive in defining them as maximalist novels, insofar as they are systematically co-present. These elements can individually be found in modernist and postmodern novels that are not maximalist; however, it is their co-presence and their reciprocal articulation that make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre. The essay shows both the peculiar significance these elements have and the function some of the categories play within the internal dialectic of the genre. It discusses chaos-function and cosmos-function and argues that categories such as “length,” “encyclopedic mode,” “dissonant chorality,” and “diegetic exuberance,” beyond their strong specificity and irreducibility to one another, play a common role against categories such as “completeness,” “narratorial omniscience,” and “paranoia,” thus creating a centrifugal/centripetal dialectic within the representation. The remaining three categories—“inter-semiocity,” “ethical commitment,” and “hybrid realism”—do not play a specific role within the internal dialectic of the genre, but are crucial—to the same extent as the other seven—to understanding the ethical and aesthetical project of the maximalist novel, which strives to relate the complexity of the world we live in and to give a synthetic and totalizing representation of it.

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Since its early formulation by Theodor Lipps, the concept of "negative empathy" has rarely received the attention it deserves in the scholarly debate on empathy. The present paper is an attempt to reconstruct its rough history and to propose a theory of negative empathy that is able to highlight its heuristic potential for the purpose of literary analysis, particularly for the study of the representation of the negative in literature. Drawing upon a range of fields of study, from neuroscience, psychology and psychonalysis to literary hermeneutics, cognitive literary studies, and aesthetics, I will try to lay the foundations for a reconceptualization of negative empathy. A high-level form of empathy, negative empathy will be described, with relation to literature, as a potentially regressive aesthetic experience, consisting in a cathartic identification with negative characters, which can be either open to agency (indifferently leading either to proor antisocial behavior), or limited to the inner life of the empathizing subject. Such theoretical hypothesis will finally be tested on Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones. K E Y W O R D S character identification, empathy and literature, narrative empathy, negative empathy 244 | ERCOLINO

This essay focuses on a little-understood phase of Franco Moretti’s work that spans 1976 to 1986. My aim is to shed light on Moretti’s cultural background as it was formed in that period and to account for the transition from the Trotskyist, politically-militant stance of his first book, Literature and Ideologies in England in the 1930s, to the idiosyncratic, seemingly disengaged character of Signs Taken for Wonders and The Way of the World. Adorno’s concept of ‘unrestrained individuation’ plays a crucial role in the argument. Following a personal political crisis, Moretti opted to enact a form of critical individuation, encoding the explicit social antagonism of the earlier years within a highly personal style and a new theoretical eclecticism. In this way, by disguising it as an alluring form of individualism, Moretti managed to smuggle an antagonistic critical discourse into an increasingly neoliberal world that would soon prove hostile toward it.

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