Experience, Affect, and Literary Lists

Abstract

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.

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