Classification of a chaos: The list and its deployment in the works of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau).

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The practice of listing is ancient and wide-ranging. Lists are versatile, adaptable structures that have figured prominently in literary history. Indeed, lists predate writing, and the conceptual methods expressed in them were instrumental in bringing writing, and literature, into existence. Practical lists and catalogues are sequences of signs whose compositions, including membership and internal arrangement, contribute to their functioning. In literary lists, the arrangements of particulars create deliberate imaginative patterns, and the functions of lists are <italic>ad hoc</italic> to the texts they occur in.
While various species of lists have been deployed throughout literature, from the catalogue of participants of the ancient epic to the delineation of the beloved in the Renaissance <italic>blazon</italic>, from the Baroquism of <italic>Ulysses</italic> to the spare itemization of <italic>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</italic>, it is in the writing of 19<super>th</super>-century America that the list finds wide application, arising with remarkable frequency and concentration in prose, poetry, and fiction. In addition to its rhetorical serviceability, evident throughout Emerson's Essays, the list in itself illustrated the principle of microcosm that so thoroughly informed Emerson's Transcendentalism, and enabled an adequate representation of the interlinkage of all things by the collection of a few. Whitman, adapting and developing the catalogue as a poetic structure, used its flexibility and expansiveness to embrace a multitudinous nation, register a miscellany of sensory impressions, and revel in the power that came from pronouncing names. In <italic>Moby-Dick</italic>, Melville elaborated the list on numerous levels, from that of strict inventory to the very catalogue-like quality of the text that intrinsically contained the many incidentals of cetology and whaling-life in order to represent the interconnectedness of all things, the idea that “nothing exists in itself.” Ishmael's amplifications and digressions were also heavily influenced by Melville's discovery of the great logorrheic Renaissance listers Rabelais, Burton, and Browne. Finally, in a shift from the fictive to the autobiographical, Thoreau turned to the list to document a personal engagement with the natural world. Coincident with the rise of a systematized method of scientific classification which allowed flora and fauna to be ordered and organized, Thoreau meticulously observed his surroundings and linked facts with poetry.