The research investigates, in certain works of contemporary literature, mostly Brazilian, a tension between the notions of counting and exposing, or even between the gestures of narrating and associating events and those of gathering and exhibiting elements. We increasingly deal with files, collections, inventories, lists, folders. We increasingly produce the past and live a flood of information in the present, and we find ourselves in difficulties to make sense of it. The main hypothesis of the research is that we are experiencing a change in the structuring of the experience, from the narrative form to the form of the database and, in poetic expression, between lyric and conceptual. The gesture of the research is to look for such a change through short stories, poems and conceptual poetry that, in our view, carry signs of this transformation. Our literary corpus will bring texts by Alex Hamburguer, André Sant Anna, Diego Pansini, Carol Rodrigues, Marta Barcellos, Nicholas Feltron, Raphael Sassaki, Reginaldo Pujol Filho and the author, among others.