The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

Jean-Michel Ganteau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032423203
• eBook ISBN: 9781000832044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Social Invisibilities
• 2 Embedded Visibilities
• 3 Of (Wo)men and Machines
• 4 Disabled Brains
• Conclusion
• References
• Index