The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing
Editor: Lucie Doležalová
Date Of Publication: Mar 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0237-6
Isbn: 1-4438-0237-9
Lists, one of the most archaic literary genres, stand behind many of our complex mental or rhetorical structures and they often influence the way we conceptualize the world (even if we are unaware of it). They seem plain but may conceal a complicated inner logic. They are agrammatical but may tell a story. Their basic features – selection, order, and layout – may be enough to give them enormous power: by including they exclude, by ordering they create a hierarchy, by taking on particular physical aspects they place themselves into a specific context.

These and other issues are discussed in the present transdisciplinary volume collecting the best revised contributions to a workshop on lists held at the Center for Theoretical Study in Prague in November 2008. Each of the 13 articles by researchers from seven countries provides a case study on the subject of list. The fields covered include late antique, medieval and early modern history, philology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. The contributors aim both at presenting particular cases – specific lists or list-types – and, at the same time, at addressing methodological issues: exploring the ways of researching lists in their particular disciplines, formulating relevant research themes and questions, contextualizing the subject. Since theoretical discourse on lists has not been established yet, this volume should be seen as a first step in the process, showing the variety of possible research directions on a transdisciplinary level, and raising interest in the topic, which, although it may seem a bit obscure at first, has indeed a lot to offer.

Lucie Doležalová (b. 1977, Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in 2005) is an assistant professor at the Philosophical Faculty and the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University in Prague. She deals with medieval Latin manuscript transmission, authored a monograph Reception and its Varieties: Reading, Re-Writing and Understanding ‘Cena Cypriani’ in the Middle Ages (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007) and is currently working on medieval mnemonics and art of memory.

“This is a highly stimulating book on a text type rarely considered as such. Besides most interesting information of the specific cases discussed here, the reader is given many insights into human behaviour.”

- Peter Stotz, Professor Emeritus, Zurich University

“This book offers a first exploration of the functions and the interpretations of a fundamental way to give order to reality: the “list” in all its forms, from the catalogue of saints or virtues to the table of contents, from the inventories of properties to the catalogues of feelings or emoticons. A wide chronological overview runs from Middle Ages to contemporary computer-aided textual analysis. Intriguing historical or technical case-studies on the background of theoretical proposals demonstrate that documented lists of the same objects change in time according different contexts, but remain an indispensable tool for building identity and controlling our perception of world and history, so creating a fascination of seriality.”

- Francesco Stella, University of Siena

“What these diverse chapters share is an attention to how the list as form functions in a particular context, and how that context, in turn, helps continually define the surprisingly slippery genre of list. As a whole, then, the volume provides the first comprehensive examination of the genre, as well as an overview of the possible interpretive strategies that might be brought to bear upon it. Many of the chapters are also concerned with how readers read lists, that is, with reception – a subject of critical interest to everyone from advertisers who make use of search engines to historians who have too often taken lists factual contents for granted.”

- Kim Bowes, Cornell University

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