"Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth:" Lists in American Literature, 1851-1956

This project traces literary catalogues through roughly a century of American literature and takes seriously the list as a distinct and rhetorically significant aesthetic category. While inventories and enumerations are typically meant to regulate and organize information, when housed within literature they behave quite differently. Literary lists can be overwhelming and boring; they can arrest narrative progression and ask us to pause for a moment of meticulous accounting. In the first chapter, I argue that Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale leaves the reader awash in a world teeming with whale facts and figures. These “oceanic” lists, I assert, toggle somewhere between the metaphorical and the literal, playing at a scientific certainty that is ultimately left unfulfilled. Chapter Two reimagines Walt Whitman’s catalogues in “Song of Myself” as initiating a rhetorical oscillation between the singular and plural, a process that works to repopulate the cultural representation of America with subjects who have traditionally been excluded or marginalized. In Chapter Three I position Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as a collection of everyday objects left suspended somewhere between utility and aesthetics, and in Chapter Four I re-envision William Faulkner as an author-carpenter who builds a six-sided narrative “coffin” with his rotating list of characters in As I Lay Dying. In Chapter Five, I argue that James Agee reaches for an ethical relation with human beings through obsessive catalogues of their material things in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and my concluding chapter argues that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” enacts what I call an “aesthetic unrest” through its insistent crowding and overwhelming amount of activity. Contrary to what some scholars identify as the list’s potentially dangerous cultural function, I argue that literary lists perform a kind of strange oscillation: a restless tension that sits unresolved and ultimately registers an ethical engagement with otherness itself. Because these lists are so fundamentally strange, I conclude, they encourage us to reconsider not only that which is familiar and comforting, but also the ideological grounds upon which those distinctions rest.

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