Listology

by Eva von Contzen

Chaucer is a great maker of lists. Lists occur everywhere in his works: think of the shorter lists of trees in The Parliament of Fowls and The Knight’s Tale, the many enumerations in the dream visions, and not least the Canterbury Tales, its enumerative Prologue, The Parson’s Tale, The Monk’s Tale, and not least the many, many lists we encounter within the tales, such as the lists of knights assembling to fight for Arcite and Palamon, the description of Alisoun in The Miller’s Tale; the Wife of Bath’s list of men, and Dorigen’s lament. But Chaucer himself has also become part of a list: the list that is more commonly known as the ‘canon’, in other words, the catalogue of writers and works that form literary history. John Lydgate, in his Prologue to The Fall of Princes, pays tribute to his “maistir Chaucer” (Prol. 246; 275) and enlists him on the rolls of literary history. He does so by enumerating his works: Continue reading “Lists and Literary History: From Chaucer to Ernst Robert Curtius” →

by Martha Rust

A list
is a list
is a list …

In his New York Times essay “The Joy of Lists,” Arthur Krystal explains that as a list “purist,” he is of the belief that “a list should aspire to ‘listhood.’” A “true list,” he goes on to say, “ought to at least look like a list.”^[1] Krystal doesn’t specify what that look is, but does he need to? When we picture a list in our minds, most of us probably see a column of words or short phrases. Words or phrases arranged vertically, often accompanied by dots or numbers: this is the iconic list, the look of “listhood.” While what a list looks like may thus go without saying, it begs a question that is more difficult to answer: What is it about a list that causes it to be so closely associated with a specific visual form? Or put more simply, what is a list? The following is a list of imaginative answers to that question drawn from a survey of writers writing about lists. As they suggest, whatever lists are, there is much more to them than words. Continue reading “What is a List?” →