My talk will be drawn from a book project tentatively titled The Information Novel that considers realism’s struggle to give an account of the world in the so-called “information age.” I want to return, in this context, to a classic feature of the literary text: the list. How are we to understand those moments in contemporary realism when literary texts shift from what Ian Bogost has characterized as “the flowing legato of a literary account” to the “jarring staccato” of the list? Reading for this musical articulation of W.G. Sebald’s work and Ben Lerner’s debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, I understand Sebald’s and Lerner’s lists (after Bogost) as “ontographic” features of contemporary realism whose staccato seeks to write “real being.”

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