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Abstract
This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
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“I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. In creating this list, and many others that appear in his writings, Thoreau was working within a little-recognized yet ancient literary tradition: the practice of listing or cataloguing. This book is the first to examine literary lists and the remarkably wide range of ways writers use them. The book first examines lists through the centuries—from Sumerian account tablets and Homer's catalogue of ships to Tom Sawyer's earnings from his fence-painting scheme—then focuses on lists in the works of four American Renaissance authors: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau. Lists serve a variety of functions in Emerson's essays, Whitman's poems, Melville's novels, and Thoreau's memoirs, and the book discusses their surprising variety of pattern, intention, scope, art, and even philosophy. In addition to guiding the reader through the list's many uses, this book explores the pleasures that lists offer.
'Our heritage was left to us without a testament." Hannah Arendt repeatedly borrows this formula (from René Char) to capture the predicament of revolutionary modernity. Without a testament, without any symbolic means of transmitting the event, there is no way to bequeath the treasure to future generations-to harvest its energy or even to bear witness to what happened. Here's the thought experiment: what if Char's formula needs to be reversed? What if the problem is not intestacy but rather a kind of hyper-Testamentarity-flot a deficit but a surfeit of testamentary protocol? The past confronts us as a thicket of injunctions, promises, exhortations, incitements-obscure messages from the dead, unsigned and undated but time-stamped and addressed to us uniquely. What if the testament itself were the heritage-or rather, if there were no heritage, only the pressure of a demand as enigmatic as it is insistent?
Lists represent a primitive and exemplary use of literacy, but, being neither prose nor verse, they occur in literature as a disruption to the reading regime. A list makes an implicit truth-claim that subverts prose, particularly critical prose. Lists imply the closure of the “great conversation” and the disarticulation of all grand narratives. This paper takes an eclectic approach, surveying a range of literary uses of the list, considering its didactic and parodic functions (ironic truth-claims), and the sense of orientalism that frequently emerges when lists appear in western literary contexts. The distinction between prose and poetry as two functions of language is both clarified and complicated by lists, which employ the everyday language of the one, but with the compression and emphasis on discontinuity of the other.
Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
- Georges Perec
Notes of a Childhood
- Susan Sontag
Why Literature Loves Lists: From Rabelais to Didion, an Incomplete List of Listmakers
- Michel Butor
The Storm over the University
- John Searle