Literary Attention in Short Fiction, or: What Literature Knows About Attention and Attention Politics

Introduction

Literature knows a lot about attention – how it is gained and retained, how it is mastered and manipulated. As such, it can contribute significantly to current research in interdisciplinary attention studies, transform debates about attentional crises, and offer deep insight into attention regimes we live by.

Project Overview

LitAttention explores this fundamentally under-researched knowledge domain of literature about attention and attention politics by analysing ‘literary attention’ in short fiction. As LitAttention will show, short fiction does not only cater to short(er) attention spans: its development was driven by attention anxieties and struggles for attention control.

Context and Influences

These struggles responded to various factors, including:

1. Technological innovation
2. New streams of information
3. The rise of attention studies
4. Changing modes of reading
5. Growing concerns about the limits of human attentional capacities
6. Intensifying struggles for attention sovereignty

Objectives

Integrating approaches from educational psychology, computational linguistics, and literary and cultural studies, LitAttention has four key objectives:

1. Examine the various ways in which short fiction has been shaped by but also shaped discourses on attention and attention management.
2. Analyse the poetics and politics of attention in short fiction by identifying syntactic, semantic, and narrative strategies that elicit attention, and assess how these narratives reflect upon, support, or subvert attention regimes of their time.
3. Develop (transferable) methodological and conceptual frameworks for examining literary attention.
4. Introduce the important role of literary attention for education.

Significance

The project is the first to conceptualize literary attention and propose a networked approach for its analysis. Its results will reveal the crucial role of short fiction in changing ecosystems of attention, have a deep impact on education, and change the way in which scholars, teachers, and the general public approach the knowledge and value of short fiction.