William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975). Yet, a defining characteristic of the encyclopedic novel is the presentation of unwanted or unnecessary information. Such writing "terminate[s] focused attention", and is in danger of boring the reader. One view of the encyclopedic novel's method, therefore, is that it requires the reader to practice modulating their attention to the text, bringing more consciousness to the act of filtering the important from the tangential. Notes Sources Bersani, Leo. "Flaubert's Encyclopedism". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 21:⅔ (Winter – Spring, 1988): 140–146 Boswell, Marshall. "Introduction: David Foster Wallace and 'The Long Thing'". Studies in the Novel 44:3 (2012): 263–266. Clark, Hillary A. "Encyclopedic Discourse". Sub-stance 21.1 (1992): 95–110. Herman, Luc. "Encyclopedic novel". Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Routledge, 2010. 137-38. Letzler, David. "Encyclopedic novels and the cruft of fiction: Infinite Jest'''s endnotes". Studies in the Novel 44:3 (2012): 304–324. Letzler, David. "The Paradox of Encyclopedic Fiction". 2012. Presented at NeMLA 2012. Reprinted in Further reading Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Novel forms Descriptive technique Encyclopedism 1970s neologisms 1976 in literature