How does the literary technique of listing resist (and demand) a story?

Grounding our understanding of the list in ancient literary forms (commandments, litanies, miscellanies, commonplace books), we will focus on a survey of lists in contemporary fiction (in novels and antinovels, language poems, comic books, indexes, ephemera, and almanacs and biographies both fictional and real). Our eventual consideration will be lists as they occur in new media (hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, video games) and the aesthetics of databases, procedural logic, and computation.