Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Editat de Eva von Contzen, James Simpsonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 15 iul 2022
Bestiaries. Lapidaries. Lunaries. Inventories and household vocabularies. Lists are everywhere in medieval and early modern texts––evidence of the need to manage and order knowledge and experience. Yet until now, listing as a formal practice has received scant scholarly attention. In Enlistment, foremost medievalists and early modernists from both the Anglo-American and German traditions investigate the humble list as a platform for better understanding how and why lists captivated period audiences. From epic catalogues of trees in Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to genealogies and the names of the divine, the lists in question come from a variety of periods, languages, and genres. Throughout, contributors demonstrate how lists have the curious capacity to challenge our categories of thinking and ordering of the world. The lists we encounter in medieval and early modern literature can thus be seen as seismographs of cultural knowledge and also as testing grounds for defining the ineffable, or unfathomable, or that which would be dangerous if otherwise expressed. Contributors: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Ingo Berensmeyer, Eva von Contzen, Alex Davis, Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram R. Keller, Alexis Kellner Becker, Kathryn Mogk Wagner, Martha Rust, James Simpson
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215227
ISBN-10: 081421522X
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 10 b&w images, 1 table
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.52 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
ISBN-10: 081421522X
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 10 b&w images, 1 table
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.52 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture
Recenzii
“Enlistment demonstrates how a narrow focus on one formal feature like the list can generate newly illuminating constellations of diverse texts … This volume establishes an exciting new area for the study of form as a mode of literary and political experimentation that ought to inspire further research on lists and their implications across various media, including literary, graphic, and musical arts.” —William Rhodes, Review of English Studies
“This fascinating volume rightly pauses over the important literary and broadly cultural work of listing. Its focus is on literary and formal considerations primarily, though clearly its approaches have application to compilatory practices more broadly, including cataloguing, collecting, and the secondary uses to which lists are put … This rich and engaging volume has more than started that discussion.” —Michael Van Dussen, Arthuriana
“Thought-provoking . . . the essays in this collection go a long way to displaying just how creative the use of lists was by the texts presented . . . The collection makes rewarding reading for literary critics and historians working on the periods discussed in this volume (and, frankly, scholars working on other literary traditions and periods will also benefit from diving into these essays).” —Ray Schrire, Modern Philology
"Thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking … Enlistment is a welcome addition to the growing field of Medieval Informatics and Information Studies." - Tekla Bude, Journal of English and German Philology
“This fine collection of essays … offers an informative and engaging examination of the list across a range of textual genres and literary contexts from Old English to Edmund Spenser. The introduction provides a critical history and theoretical overview of textual enlistment, which, in its thoroughness and breadth, will be invaluable to future studies of this subject.” —John Joseph Gallagher, Forum for Modern Language Studies
Notă biografică
Eva von Contzen (Editor) Eva von Contzen is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration.James Simpson (Editor) James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University and author of several books, including Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.
Extras
The noun enlistment dates to the eighteenth century and means the action of enrolling someone on the ‘list’ of a military body. In Western literature, literary listing begins with the act of enlisting someone: one of the oldest forms of the list in European poetry is the muster of armies, as in the second book of Homer’s Iliad. More than forty leaders of the Greek army are enumerated here, accompanied by various ethnonyms and toponyms. Used in a broader sense, to enlist someone means to win their support in joining or supporting something or someone, voluntarily. It is an action and a practice that highlights the potential of the list as a form to include and exclude, to create a sense of belonging, of exclusivity, of demarcation. As a poetic stratagem, enlistment directs our attention to the ways in which enumerative, list-like practices of ordering implicate audiences in the sense-making process. Through the various forms of enumeration medieval authors could draw on, they attempt to align—to ‘enlist,’ indeed—readers with their projects. Such strategies of enlisting audiences are especially pertinent in contexts in which enumerative principles do not fulfill any immediate practical functions. As a strategic undertaking, the kind of enlistment we are interested in is intimately tied to poetic functions and purposes and manifests itself at the intersections of the structural arrangement of a text, its content and context, and the cognitive processes of meaning making that are evoked in the reception process.
In this volume, we conceive of the ‘list’ in a broad and abstract sense. We use it as an umbrella term for various practices and principles of ordering that are characterized by enumerative and/or sequential patterns. What these enumerative practices have in common is that one cannot ignore them; the list form draws attention to itself and calls for an in-depth study of its implications. It may be true that lists are the one formal element in texts that (modern) readers are most likely to skip, but in a context of oral-aural reception, there is no escape from the list. The many examples of lists in medieval and early modern literature strongly suggest that enumerative forms seem to have exerted a special power. Audiences must have taken delight in enumerations—how else could we explain their proliferation? What is called for is a nuanced analysis of the specific forms and functions of lists within medieval and early modern literature in general and within individual works in particular. Our volume is the attempt to take the list as a Denkform—a way of thinking—seriously and to scrutinize its manifestations and functions in order to better understand how and why premodern audiences were prone to be ‘enlisted.’
In this volume, we conceive of the ‘list’ in a broad and abstract sense. We use it as an umbrella term for various practices and principles of ordering that are characterized by enumerative and/or sequential patterns. What these enumerative practices have in common is that one cannot ignore them; the list form draws attention to itself and calls for an in-depth study of its implications. It may be true that lists are the one formal element in texts that (modern) readers are most likely to skip, but in a context of oral-aural reception, there is no escape from the list. The many examples of lists in medieval and early modern literature strongly suggest that enumerative forms seem to have exerted a special power. Audiences must have taken delight in enumerations—how else could we explain their proliferation? What is called for is a nuanced analysis of the specific forms and functions of lists within medieval and early modern literature in general and within individual works in particular. Our volume is the attempt to take the list as a Denkform—a way of thinking—seriously and to scrutinize its manifestations and functions in order to better understand how and why premodern audiences were prone to be ‘enlisted.’
Cuprins
Introduction Enlistment as Poetic Stratagem Chapter 1 “He should not overlook anything that could ever be of significance”: Knowledge and Vocabulary in Gerefa Chapter 2 In the Space of a List—Widsith’s Global Modernism Chapter 3 Listing Divine Names: A Study in Liturgical Form Chapter 4 Naming the Children of Jacob: The Shape of Negative Theology in the Benjamin Minor Chapter 5 Out of Eden and Back Again: Following the Flow of Concepts, Categories, and Lists in the Four Rivers of Paradise Chapter 6 Epic Lists: The Matter of Troy and the Catalogue Form in Middle English Literature Chapter 7 Performing Generic Exhaustion: Implosive Households in Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honour Chapter 8 The Epic Tree Catalogue from Chaucer to Spenser Chapter 9 What’s in a List? Erasmus, Cromwell, Bale Chapter 10 Reformation Lists: Syntax, the Sacred, and the Production of Junk
Descriere
Unearths the cultural significance of medieval and early modern lists from Chaucer’s and Spenser’s epic catalogues of trees, to household vocabulary, to genealogies and bestiaries.