Conference Organiser – Attending to Literature

harrietelander,

School of English, University of Nottingham

Attending to Literature: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Attention and Distraction

Conference description

A conference inviting a wide range of interpretations of the concept of attention. In keeping with the symposium’s public-facing emphasis, we had contributions which presented research in a manner that is sufficiently detailed to be helpful to specialists but written with an eye to a wider public audience.

TOPICS

  1. ’Attention Panic’ – Public anxieties about digital distraction and the threat to attention.
  1. Historicising attention – How do the present digitally-fuelled anxieties about attention relate to earlier thinkers on attention and distraction, from Pascal through, for instance, Nietzsche, Simmel and Benjamin?
  1. The attention economy – Has attention itself become a commodity, and how has this commodification taken new forms with the development of digital technology?
  1. Attending to the body – Various moral philosophers have emphasised embodiment in their discussions of attention: might engaging in certain physical practices and manual or craft work help cultivate certain forms of perception and attentiveness?
  1. Attention and attentiveness in ethics – What is the role of attentiveness as a concept in ethics?
  1. Compulsory Attentiveness – Drawing on Manne’s recent work on ‘The Logic of Misogyny’, we might ask: what moral hazards arise when attentiveness becomes an expectation that is applied to some groups more than others?

Topics focused on attention in literature:

  1. Attention in literary ethics: How might the concept of attention be bound up with accounts of literature’s moral work?
  2. Attending in and to the text: What kinds of attention do different literary forms demand or cultivate in the reader? Is the reader’s attention to the text the same as the attention required to write it? Or the interpersonal attention depicted in it?
  3. Attention in critical traditions: How do different moments in the history of literary criticism rely on the concept of attention?
  4. Poetry analysis and attention

What forms of attention are produced in sustained moments of literary analysis? Might the concentrated and immersive nature of close reading induce states of meditative attention that are distinctive?