Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond: Towards a Poetics of Enumeration

Description

Lists and catalogues have been en vogue in philosophy, cultural, media and literary studies for more than a decade. These explorations of enumerative modes, however, have not yet had the impact on classical scholarship that they deserve. While they routinely take (a limited set of) ancient models as their starting point, there is no comparably comprehensive study that focuses on antiquity; conversely, studies on lists and catalogues in Classics remain largely limited to individual texts, and – with some notable exceptions – offer little in terms of explicit theorising. The present volume is an attempt to close this gap and foster the dialogue between the recent theoretical re-appraisal of enumerative modes and scholarship on ancient cultures. The 16 contributions to the volume juxtapose literary forms of enumeration with an abundance of ancient non-, sub- or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing. In their different approaches to this vast and heterogenous corpus, they offer a sense of the hermeneutic, epistemic and methodological challenges with which the study of enumeration is faced, and elucidate how pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics are mediated in lists and catalogues. Preface Contents List of Figures List of Tables Introduction: Lists, Catalogues etc. pp Part I: Theoretical Approaches to Lists and Catalogues Musing about a Table of Contents. Some Theoretical Questions Concerning Lists and Catalogues Theorising Lists in Literature: Towards a Listology Part II: The Cultural Poetics of Enumeration: Contexts, Materiality, Organisation Lists and Chains: Enumeration in Akkadian Literary Texts. With an appendix on this Device in Borges and Hughes Textual Webs: How to Read Mythographic Lists The Performativity of Lists in Vernacular Curse-Practice under the Roman Empire Powers of Suggestion of Powers: Attribute- Lists in Greek Hymns (En)listing the Good Authors: The Defence of Greek Linguistic Variety in the Antiatticist Lexicon Part III: The Poetics of the Epic Catalogue The Catalogue in Early Greek Epic Catalogues in Greek and Akkadian Epic: A Comparative Approach Reliability and Evasiveness in Epic Catalogues Looking Backwards to Posterity: Catalogues of Ancestry from Homer to Ovid Homeric Heroes Speaking in Lists: Comical Characterisation through Catalogues Part IV: Beyond the Epic Catalogue: Literary Appropriations of Lists and Catalogues Five Times Seven: Cataloguing the Seven against Thebes in Four Greek Tragedies The Aesthetics of the Comic List Cataloguing Contemporaries: Ovid Ex Ponto 4.16 in Context Cataloguing Statues: Christodoros’ Ekphrasis of the Baths of Zeuxippos List of Contributors General Index General Index Index of Ancient Passages Discussed