exploring lists in all their possibilities
by Martha Rust
In his essay “A College Magazine,” Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) reminisces about his boyhood strategies for accomplishing a cherished goal: becoming a writer. These self-assigned exercises included describing the world around him, copying down remembered conversations, and, what he found most profitable to his growth– imitating works he admired.
Continue reading “Of knights, a parrot, piracy, and the list as treasure chest”by Martha Rust
Is it right to call a collection of images or things a list? In an early Listology post, “Ten Essentials for hiking,” we raised this question and in subsequent posts, “#adorablepets: Why Instagram Loves Lists” and “Lists and/as Artworks,” we answered it with a resounding “yes.” Following those entries, my own “Two Lists of Labors in Honor of Labor Day” and a “A list on the work of things” took the propriety of both “visual lists” and lists of things all but for granted.
Continue reading “L’allure de liste: The Look of a List”
When asked to name the most famous and also oldest and longest list in literature, many a listophile would choose Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad, and we would probably be correct. But would any of us have a sense of what an infinitesimal fraction of ancient Greek lists Homer’s ship list represents? Athena Kirk’s book Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogue and Inventory Across Genres (Cambridge University Press, 2021) raises the curtain on the multitudinous lists produced by the list-loving culture in Greece during Homer’s age and for generations to follow. Given its field-opening findings, we are pleased to introduce Kirk’s book to our readers by way of the following interview with her.
Continue reading “List Restoration: An Interview With Athena Kirk”
by Eva von Contzen
Alex Johnson’s A Book of Book Lists is a treasure hoard of reading lists, lists of books to read and lists having to do with reading. It contains to-read lists, inventories of bookshelves, collections of library slips, and book recommendations by writers, pop stars, presidents, and terrorists; there are prospective, fictional, metaphorical, and impossible reading lists. Continue reading “Literary Lists: Lists of and in Books”
by Leslie Myrick and Martha Rust
As this post goes live on December 24th, Santa is beginning his annual trip delivering gifts to children around the globe, which the young at heart of all ages may follow thanks to NORAD’s Santa tracker.1 Somehow Santa knows what children want for Christmas, but how?
Continue reading “What Children Want: Wish Lists and Beyond in Letters to Santa”
Fig. 1 The bay horse, Daisy, at a gallop (Plate 526)
by Colin Harris
Continue reading “Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion”by Martha Rust
A survey of Listology posts shows that the list form is often used to convey advice or wisdom, and when it does, the list’s items are limited to a certain number, which is then featured in its title: the Ten Essentials for Hiking, for instance, or Seven Lessons from Mister Rogers. In this post, we consider an ancient list-based genre of literature that elaborates on this kind of advisory list. Famed German literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) placed this list-based genre in the category of wisdom literature and gave it the name Zahlenspruch, or “numbered saying,” which Willard R. Trask translated as “numerical apothegm.”[1] As our examples will show, whether or not a numerical apothegm conveys wisdom, it gives a reader much to think about.[2]
Continue reading ““There are three things…”: Introducing the Numerical Apothegm”We at Listology recently had the pleasure of reading Katie Little’s list insights in her recent publication, “The Politics of Lists,” in the journal Exemplaria.[1] For those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading the article, Little uses medieval lists written in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a historical record of England compiled before the eleventh century) to re-examine modern materiality theorists’ idea that lists are ideology-free because they blend human and non-human subjects. We at Listology would like to continue this conversation about lists’ ideological and political characteristics , and the article’s author, Katherine Little, has kindly obliged us by answering some of our questions—some of which readers will find answered more extensively in her article published by Exemplaria.
by Kerstin Fest
In the theatre we encounter stories, first and foremost those written by playwrights and acted out on stage. But there are also stories produced behind and beyond the stage. Gaining awareness of these secondary stories and piecing them together helps one study and understand the theatre. Continue reading “The Story of Theatrical Lists”
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