The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

It addresses the changes mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting them to the tyranny of a new attention economy to show how the contemporary novel and memoir evince resilience by promoting an ecology of attention whose poetics help develop an ethics of the particularist type

This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject, submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an "ecology of attention" (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this, I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: psychology, but also more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fictional and non-fictional narratives, I address such issues as social invisibilities, climate change, AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention.

Autorentext

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of four monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l'éloquence (2001), Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (2008) and The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (2015), The Aesthetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative (Routledge 2023). He has published extensively on contemporary British fiction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects trauma criticism and theory, and the ethics of vulnerability, in France and abroad (other European countries, the United States), in the form of chapters in edited volumes or articles in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, The Cambridge Quarterly, and so on.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Attention Economy

2. A Relatively Recent Category

3. An Ethical Apparatus

4. Attention to the Ordinary

5. Turning towards Literature Chapter 1: Social Invisibilities

1. Refugee Tales

2. Showing

3. Ghosting

4. Caring

5. Raging

1. Exploring the Closet

   1. Visibilities
   2. Shifting Perceptions
   3. Ending with a Whimper

2. Wandering with Intent

   1. Investigating the Ordinary
   2. What Matters
      Chapter 2: Embedded Visibilities

1. Seeing the Land

   1. Observing What Is Lost
   2. The Anti-Pastoral
   3. Relationalities
   4. Inventorying

2. On the Same Spectrum

   1. Collecting the Mundane
   2. Perceptual Realism
   3. Consideration(s)

3. Discordant Scales

   1. Echoes and Portents
   2. Acknowledging the Anthropocene
   3. Inescapable Entanglements
      Chapter 3: Of (Wo)men and Machines

1. The Time Will Come

   1. A Time Out of Joint
   2. Machines That Mimic Minds?
   3. Quandaries
   4. Beyond Exceptionalism?

2. Artificial Perception

   1. An Unwonted Focus

   2. AI Vulnerability

   3. Machine Vigilance

Chapter 4: Disabled Brains

1. Linguistic Impairment

   1. Varying Attentional Tides
   2. Perceptual Immediacy
   3. An "Ethics from Down Under"

2. Autobiography and Cognitive Disability

   1. Doubles
   2. Oscillations
   3. Relationality über alles
      Conclusion

References

Index