Definition:
A series of particular images or details often used in essays and other works of creative nonfiction to evoke a sense of place or character. See also:
- Writing With Lists
- Compose a List
- Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
- Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"
Examples and Observations:
- "Her speech was an endlessly interesting, swerving path of old punch lines, heartfelt cris de coeur, puns new and old, dramatic true confessions, challenges, witty one-liners, wee Scotticisms, tag lines from Frank Sinatra songs, obsolete mountain nouns, and moral exhortations."
(Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, Harper & Row, 1987) - "Long before the Big Three and the nickname ‘Motor City’; before the auto factories and the freighters and the pink, chemical nights; before anyone had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a Model T; previous to the day a young Henry Ford knocked down his workshop wall because, devising his ‘quadricycle,’ he’d thought of everything but how to get the damn thing out; and nearly a century prior to the cold March night, in 1896, when Charles King tiller-steered his horseless carriage down St. Antoine, along Jefferson, and up Woodward Avenue (where the two-stroke engine promptly quit); way, way back when the city was just a piece of stolen Indian land located on the strait from which it got its name, a fort fought over by the British and French until, wearing them out, it fell into the hands of the Americans; way back then, before cars and cloverleaves, Detroit was made of wheels.”
(Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex: A Novel, Farrar, 2002) - "Lists . . . may compile a history, gather evidence, order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness, and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences."
(Robert Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloging, 2004)
Also Known As: series, catalog, inventory
