Don’t Trust the List: The Politics of Enumeration and Capitalist Discourse in the Novel

Abstract

This chapter highlights the often invisible political agendas behind lists (the “politics of the list”) and makes a case for reading lists suspiciously and symptomatically rather than “on the surface.” Based on recent work on formal approaches to literature, the list is understood as a cognitive form that elicits a range of affordances, depending on the context of use. To what extent a reading of lists in the novel can profit from such an approach is demonstrated by the example of capitalist discourse, which manifests itself through the list form in the novel from the nineteenth century to today.