This post inaugurates a new Listology series entitled “’Just’ a list.” Each of the posts in this series will offer a list without commentary or analysis, just the list, which will be drawn from (or be added to) our list of literary lists. The quotation marks around “just” in the series’ title is meant to register our opinion that a list is never “just” or “merely” a list, as our posts that comment on lists always show. Timed to celebrate the grand leafing out of trees in the northeast of the US and in other regions of a similar latitude, our selection for this inaugural post in the “’Just’ a list” series is the list of trees that concludes Ovid’s story of Orpheus in his Metamorphoses.
Continue reading ““Just” a list: Ovid’s gathering of trees”James Joyce’s Refrigerator, or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lists (numbers 1-6)
by Jeremy Gavron
One. List, ledger, inventory, exempla, litany, series, tally, catalogue, compendium, manifest, enumeration, register, roll, index, menu, repository, midden.[1]
Continue reading “James Joyce’s Refrigerator, or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lists (numbers 1-6)”ERC Starting Grant Project on Lists in Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg
by Sarah Link and Anne Rueggemeier
“Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, Rock Around the Clock” …
Some of us might first feel the rhythmic pattern of the words, others try to concentrate on individual names and connect them to events. Whatever your reactions to these words from Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire”, it shows in a nutshell many of the cultural, poetic, cognitive and epistemological characteristics that make it so attractive to study lists. And lists are everywhere: shopping lists, to-do lists, bucket lists, rankings, CVs, 1000 places to see before you die, English seminar reading lists and, of course, the sheer infinity of the list encountered, for example, in the local library catalogue. Continue reading “ERC Starting Grant Project on Lists in Literature and Culture at the University of Freiburg”
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