This is going to be about everything or, Framing the Limits of the Post-Literary

What might emerge from taking everything as an object of study? What is to be read into the increasing incidence of texts (of all kinds) that have the word everything in their title, especially at a time when talk – academic and not – about a ‘theory of everything’ is ‘a thing’? How is the inevitability of the question of framing, there, to be itself framed – and pitched? How, indeed, should an investigation into everything and its semantics and connotative potentials proceed? What levels of seriousness, and what measure, tone, form, style, approach, could it wear? The text that follows offers preliminary thoughts on putting everything – the word; its shifting literal, rhetorical, specialist senses; ‘everything’ as concept and idea – in the frame. It finds that to look squarely upon everything with an academic gaze in an academic space (for instance, in a journal), occasions, perhaps compels, some unorthodoxy. It suggests some implications that follow for the conception and articulation of the post-literary and the countertextual, in the framing context of which this questioning of everything is being broached in the first place. Or, at least, it would bear those implications if one were to take seriously the possibility of putting everything in-frame – and/or (this supplement-and-alternative are unavoidable) beyond frame. In consequence, whether and how to take everything seriously, and why, matters. Seriousness, then, is in play: with everything – including the framing conventions at work in this abstract.