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This paper teases out the intersections of list-making as an everyday experience and the incorporation of lists and enumerations in literary texts. Drawing on cognitive literary theory and the notion of experientiality, I argue that lists evoke our sensorimotor experience (the practice of writing lists) as well as our capacity to structure and organize the world (using and making sense of lists). When we as readers encounter lists in literary texts, such as the shopping lists in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, our experience of making lists ourselves is evoked and thus leads to an experiential response that cannot be explained by Monika Fludernik’s definition of experientiality as a “quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience.’” This is due to the nature of lists and the practice of making lists, which combines physical with cognitive experience.
June 2018: Eva von Contzen is junior professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg and the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture.” She is the author of a monograph on medieval hagiography (The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration; Manchester 2016) and pursues her interest in narrative theory and medieval literature in the interdisciplinary network “Medieval Narratology.” She is the co-editor of a handbook of historical narratology (with Stefan Tilg). Currently, her main project is devoted to lists and enumerations in literary texts from Antiquity to postmodernism.