I have been examining here the way that the various media of literary collections lay contents on the table and thereby organize for us a disciplinary field and indeed the work of our own lives as editors and critics. To say that one is putting something on the table is a way of metaphorically physicalizing a business transaction, the transaction here being the discipline of vernacular literary studies. But for me the word “table” has also its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century meanings. In Hamlet and in Locke, tables of the brain are malleable by what one imprints on them, Samuel Johnson terrified (in Rambler No. 4) that the imprinting on paper might directly without one’s own consent or intervention print ideas on the tables of one’s mind.

    The table of contents in the medium of the disciplinary anthology allows our eyes to run over a field, organizing our world cognitively. This “plain” may be like the cities Sodom and Gomorrah, but for all that, Welish insists, it is a “not loathsome array of which man takes hold” (257); a table is a useful urbanity. For Welish, demystifying the artificiality of literary objects does not invalidate them: “Take hold,” she orders; study and learn them all the while seeing their genesis as human artifacts. We can recognize the cognitive impact of our medial environment without becoming technological determinists. Our literary world is continuously transformed by theory and practice, ideas and materials: conceptual developments predict and inure us to new media that themselves re-cognize how we think.