List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed

Series: Recursions

"List Cultures is an important book, both form a scientific and a societal point of view, which brilliantly illustrates the role humanities can and must play in debates that may seem unhospitable to them, but that are are cruelly in need of the broader civilizational approach updated by Young. His book is the perfect example of how to continue, instead of debunking or deconstructing, the quasi-mythical study of lists by Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind), which it is now possible to reread afresh."
- Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews, May 2018.

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.