Close Reading as Attentional Practice

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

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Beskrivning

Modernity of the digital age is beset by accusations that we are more distracted than ever, and that attention spans have become problematically compressed. It is an important moment, then, to explore the capacity of the tools of 'close reading' offered by our humanities disciplines to help develop and enable self-reflexivity around our attentional practices. These practices did not begin with the famous proponents of the early twentieth century but have been in formation since at least the Middle Ages. Exploring examples from the twelfth to the twentieth century, this book explores how methods of reading closely have been tools over the centuries for changing or challenging attentional habits and therefore changing the way the world is experienced.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-11-30
Mått:156 x 234 x 19 mm
Vikt:530 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:264
Förlag:Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:9781399521116

Utforska kategorier

Litteraturteori inom Skönlitteratur
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
Kulturvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik

Mer om författaren

Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute. She publishes primarily on the relationship between culture and technology (understood in the broadest terms) and her current projects sit within the interdisciplinary field of attention studies. See marionthain.org for more details. Ewan Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (2014) and The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a Concept (2023), along with numerous articles on prosody, poetics, digital humanities and pedagogy, for journals that include Critical Inquiry, Representations and ELH.

Recensioner i media

When attention is under siege, reading remains our best defence – not as shelter, but as training. Across centuries, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Austen and Proust and beyond, reading teaches us to notice how we notice. The essays in this volume do the same: by attending to each other, they invite us to join the conversation.

Innehållsförteckning

List of FiguresNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Close Reading and AttentionMarion Thain and Ewan Jones1. Literary Attention, Animation and Imagined Communities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of SongsJulie Orlemanski 2. Reading as a Mode of Attention: Medieval Prayer Practice and the Reader’s SpeculationRacha Kirakosian 3. Genesis of Attention to Secular Verse: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Elizabethan Poetic TheoryNigel Smith 4. ‘A Stranger Upon Earth’: Thomas Traherne, Meditation and the Form of Poetic AttentionJane Partner5. Divided: Distraction as a Vibrant Style of Mind in Jane AustenNatalie M. Phillips and Sydney Logsdon 6. Aesthetic Technologies of Attention: Aestheticism, Impressionism, Criticism and Oscar WildeMarion Thain7. On Interest and Being Interested: Attention and Reading in ProustPatrick ffrench 8. Reading in a Darkened Room: I. A. Richards and the Uses of DistractionEwan Jones 9. Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Circle of AttentionAtti Viragh 10. Lydia Davis and the Power of SentencesEileen JohnIndex