What role do lists play in literary texts? How and why do writers arrange names, objects, places, events, ideas, etc., in catalogues and inventories?

Lists appear to impose order on multiplicity. They classify, preserve, count, compare, and draw heterogeneous materials into relation. Yet they can also produce the opposite effects: fragmentation, monotony, vertigo, or chaos. An enumeration may disrupt narrative flow, or flatten distinctions between major and minor elements. At the same time, listing can itself become a mode of storytelling, shaping temporal sequences, constructing characters, recording memories, or registering the rhythm of labor, consumption, or violence.

This panel invites papers on enumeration, parataxis, and related forms of accumulation in literature from the nineteenth century to the present.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• realist and naturalist descriptions and inventories of commodities;
• parataxis and montage in modernist literature;
• postmodernist encyclopedism and combinatory literature;
• enumerative practices in documentary and testimonial writing;
• literary appropriations or parodies of bureaucratic, scientific, commercial, or taxonomic discourse;
• bibliographies, anthologies, and canon formation;
• digital lists, databases, and contemporary experimental writing;
• the politics of naming, counting, inclusion, and exclusion.

We welcome abstracts for 20-minute presentations, to be submitted through the ACLA portal. Please contact Carlo Arrigoni ([email protected]) and Irene Bulla ([email protected]) with any questions.