Who reads long novels today \u2014 and why? In the context of the DFG Priority Programme “Times of the Aesthetic”, this research project seeks to analyse forms of temporality in contemporary \u2018encyclopaedic fiction\u2019. With this term, we denote long novels which represent objects massively distributed in time, beyond human experience, linear succession, or conventional eventfulness. In representing non-human times, these long narratives fuse a succession of limited, temporal experiences into panoramic overviews. Encyclopaedic novels lay claim to an ultimate durational scale, which emerges from the reader\u2019s active engagement with multiple, intersecting narrative times. In analysing this strategy of exhaustiveness, particular emphasis will be placed on the self-reflexive measures by means of which long novels justify their strategies of figuring temporality.<\/p>\n
In addition to this implicit self-reflection, we proceed from the hypothesis that the \u2018proper temporality\u2019 of the encyclopaedic form emerges from an interaction with actual, recoverable practices of reading, performed by distinct interpretative communities. This negotiation of temporal knowledge by empirical readers will be reconstructed from the perspective of literary sociology. We aim to describe the communities which complement encyclopaedic fiction with expansive commentary and annotations.<\/p>\n