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

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 5 Contents 7 List of Figures 11 List of Tables 13 Introduction: Lists, Catalogues etc. pp 15 Part I: Theoretical Approaches to Lists and Catalogues 33 Musing about a Table of Contents. Some Theoretical Questions Concerning Lists and Catalogues 33 Theorising Lists in Literature: Towards a Listology 49 Part II: The Cultural Poetics of Enumeration: Contexts, Materiality, Organisation 71 Lists and Chains: Enumeration in Akkadian Literary Texts. With an appendix on this Device in Borges and Hughes 71 Textual Webs: How to Read Mythographic Lists 95 The Performativity of Lists in Vernacular Curse-Practice under the Roman Empire 121 Powers of Suggestion of Powers: Attribute- Lists in Greek Hymns 159 (En)listing the Good Authors: The Defence of Greek Linguistic Variety in the Antiatticist Lexicon 183 Part III: The Poetics of the Epic Catalogue 211 The Catalogue in Early Greek Epic 211 Catalogues in Greek and Akkadian Epic: A Comparative Approach 225 Reliability and Evasiveness in Epic Catalogues 243 Looking Backwards to Posterity: Catalogues of Ancestry from Homer to Ovid 259 Homeric Heroes Speaking in Lists: Comical Characterisation through Catalogues 295 Part IV: Beyond the Epic Catalogue: Literary Appropriations of Lists and Catalogues 319 Five Times Seven: Cataloguing the Seven against Thebes in Four Greek Tragedies 319 The Aesthetics of the Comic List 341 Cataloguing Contemporaries: Ovid Ex Ponto 4.16 in Context 375 Cataloguing Statues: Christodoros’ Ekphrasis of the Baths of Zeuxippos 415 List of Contributors 435 General Index General Index 439 Index of Ancient Passages Discussed 445 "This volume juxtaposes lists and catalogues in poetic texts from the ancient world with the abundance of non-, sub-, or para-literary practices of listing and cataloguing in contexts such as lexicography, mythography, genealogy or magic. In establishing both unifying concerns and divergences in approaches to this varied corpus, it sheds light on their functions at the intersection of pragmatics, materiality, performativity and aesthetics."--4e de couverture