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Workshop - Lists of Life

Life Writing and the Poetics of List Making
When Jan 18, 2019
from 09:15 AM to 05:00 PM
Where FRIAS, Albertstr. 19, Seminar Room
Contact Name
Attendees universitätsoffen / open to University members
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The workshop “Lists of Life – Life Writing and the Poetics of List Making” aims to contribute to the current scholarly discussions about the form of the list in literary discourses (cf. Belknap 2004, von Contzen 2016, Eco 2009, Mainberger 2003, Poole 2015) and aims to detect and explore the different forms and functions of list making in historically diverse forms of life narratives.

The workshop intends to investigate and discuss what happens (in terms of conceptualizing the self, making sense of the past, challenging memory and knowledge, ordering experience) when the practical list, the form of the everyday, is taken up again in a literary context. This question promises to provide essential insights in the context of autobiographical writing which is itself located at the crossroads between the referential and the imaginary, the mimetic and the poetic, the descriptive and the prescriptive.

Questions discussed will include but are not limited to:

  • What kinds of lists do we find in autobiographical writing across the centuries and what are their purposes?
  • What is the relationship between practical lists (such as CVs, daily schedules, epigraphs, pedigrees, birth registers etc.) and literary lists?
  • What role can lists play with regard to memory and remembrance?
  • To what extent is the list used as an ordering principle, and to what extent does it deny order and highlight fragmentariness?
  • To which other cultural and historical discourses does the list lend itself as a tool (self-evaluation, optimization, economization, administration, standardization, scientification etc.)?
  • Is the list’s function as a literary device, as a cultural tool and as a means of meaning making explicitly reflected on in life narratives?
 

For more Information about the programme, please refer to here.