Literary Attention: From the Twentieth Century to the Present

The last two decades have seen a steady rise in critical production on the subject of attention.From Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception (1999) to the recent "Twelve Theses of Attention" (a manifesto composed by the "Friends of Attention" in 2020), "attention studies" have inspired interdisciplinary projects that straddle philosophy, cognitive science, economics, history, media, and art.To turn to a literary investigation of human attention is not to forgo interest in its interdisciplinary scope.The articles collected here read literature through the prism of recent philosophical, sociological, aesthetic, and empirical research on attention; collectively, they show how these diverse disciplinary findings contribute to a productive rethinking of the concept and its phenomenological, social, and political expressions.Each article presents a particular discursive and social snapshot of a term in flux; together the articles trace a telling change in the nature of artistic inquiry into attention from the early twentieth century to the present.Where modernist artists sought to record the mechanism of attention as a uniquely subjective and impressionistic phenomenon, current artistic explorations increasingly show the performance of attention to be a politically and socially sanctioned act: to attend is to stage allegiance, compliance, or resistance.In writing, the gesture is double: its stylistic and thematic expressions can be in agreement or can work against one another for aesthetic or ideological effect.