Lily Gurton-Wachter

Watchwords

Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Lily Gurton-Wachter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. März 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9780804796958
• ISBN-10: 0804796955
• Artikelnr.: 44383358

Autorenporträt

Lily Gurton-Wachter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Attention's Disciplines
chapter abstract
This introduction discusses a variety of difficulties in the study of
"attention," focusing on the Romantic period in Britain as a particularly
undisciplined and unruly moment when, despite various attempts to
discipline it, attention oscillated from medicine to pedagogy, from
philosophy to science, and from politics to poetics. 1798 emerges as a
pivotal year for this crisis-when Alexander Crichton first diagnoses
attention's maladies, when Wordsworth laments the "savage torpor" in the
minds of his readers, and when the British government amps up demands that
every civilian keep watch for invasion. This confluence of concerns about
attention sets the stage for a Romantic poetics that, following William
Cowper, finds in the act of reading both absorption and loss, attention and
lapse. William Blake's poem "The Shepherd" exemplifies how the Romantic
poetics of attention criticizes the militarization of attention and
pastoral power, while also introducing gentler, alternatives modes of
keeping watch.
1Reading, a Double Attention
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how eighteenth-century philosophers and rhetoricians
imagined people paying (or not paying) attention as they read, focusing on
Joseph Priestley's idea that serious subjects should not be represented in
verse, since it "shews double attention." But the phrase "double attention"
appeared in these years in both military texts and in poetic ones, and not
only indicating weakness. Romantic poetics re-appropriates Priestley's
complaint: from Wordsworth and Coleridge's theories of meter to Blake's
poetic practice, these poets embraced a model of double attention in which
division is a strength. In Blake's writing, aesthetic and political modes
of observation merge in uncomfortable ways. In contrast to "Satan's Watch
Fiends," Blake's figures for state surveillance, Blake demands of his
reader an attention that is both passive and multiple, divided not only
between text and image, but also among competing grammars and syntaxes, and
multiple ways of reading minute punctuation marks.
2The Poetics of Alarm and the Passion of Listening
chapter abstract
This chapter investigates attention's affective shapes, focusing on how
attention's unusual relationship to terror and fear shifted as
controversies about political alarmism emerged in the 1790s. Cowper's "The
Needless Alarm" and Coleridge's "Fears in Solitude" worry in verse the
unexpected proximity between alarmism and poetry. Both poems consider what
Cowper calls "the sounds of war," pushing apart the gap between sound and
sense in order to consider the relation between poetic language and the
"empty sounds" of propaganda and alarmism. But whereas Cowper imagines the
poet's own widening attention as fearless, Coleridge finds the simple act
of attention inextricable from alarm. And whereas Cowper's poem finds hope
in a mode of listening to sound without thinking of it as the sound of
something, Coleridge's poem, itself more difficult to read, instead
registers satirically the frightening impossibility of reading without
suspicion.
3Bent Earthwards: Wordsworth's Poetics of the Interval
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on a story De Quincey tells about Wordsworth, who,
when he put his ear to the ground to listen for the arrival of the
newspaper, looked up and noticed that a new perception arrives only when
the "organs of attention" relax from an attentive brace. Investigating how
Wordsworth's verse formally manages, deflects, and distracts the reader's
attention, the chapter rereads "There Was a Boy" to articulate a poetics of
the interval that promises perception through and at the moment of lapse.
De Quincey's own interest in the military order to "Attend!" make clear the
wartime stakes of this phenomenological insight. And reading The Prelude in
light of this phenomenological insight reveals how, when Wordsworth tries
to witness the French Revolution, he only gains a sense of history in the
intervals between two states of heightened attention.
4"That Something Living is Abroad": Missing the Point in Beachy Head
chapter abstract
This chapter finds in Charlotte Smith's final prospect poem, Beachy Head, a
preoccupation with figures of keeping watch, including a geological
watchfulness that undermines the wartime logic of natural enmity by
suggesting that England and France were once one indistinguishable land
mass. Smith's poem borrows from scientific observation to cultivate an
attention to the slight sounds that "just tell that something living is
abroad." Juxtaposing poetic, military, and scientific practices of
observation, Beachy Head presents a landscape teeming with both sounds and
listeners overlapping and intertwining, emptying alarms to create an
archive of outdated modes of attention. Moving from horizon to the ground,
from the prospect view to a more and more minute observation, Smith depicts
a heightened and yet divided attention that she also demands of her reader,
who must likewise move between the poetic text and its unfolding footnotes.
5Attention's Aches in Keats's Hyperion Poems
chapter abstract
This chapter considers the postwar pains of paying attention to another's
pain. Exemplifying an unconventional tradition from the early Romantics to
Walter Benjamin that understands attention as weakening rather than
strengthening the cognitive subject, Keats's Hyperion poems explore the
experience of paying attention to violence and the violence of just paying
attention. Putting Keats's fragments in the context of both the fragmented
sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles and Charles Bell's descriptions of
soldiers wounded at Waterloo with amputated limbs, Keats's fragments emerge
as meditations on the strange overlap between paying attention to another's
suffering and paying attention to art. In contrast to the theory of
sympathy posited by Adam Smith, for whom attention is only a preliminary
step to a fuller sympathy grounded in narrative, Keats's fragments resist
the fullness of narrative and find satisfaction instead in the simple act
of paying attention.
Afterword: Afterword: Just Looking
chapter abstract
The afterword turns from Keats's attitude reading about war in
Milton-saying "so it is"-to Simone Weil, who is preoccupied with a
"decreative" model of attention as retreat and passivity, as not taking
sides, and whose interpretation of The Iliad finds Homer remarkable in his
ability also to represent war without taking sides. Weil's 1939 essay, The
Iliad, or the Poem of Force, suggests what a literary criticism of mere
attention might look like, since Weil described her methodology as just
looking, anticipating recent rejections of critique and suspicion in
interpretation. For Weil, attention should be radically impersonal, as it
is in Emily Dickinson's 1863 "Four Trees," a poem about the minimal action
of noticing the overlooked background of a landscape, and the white space
behind poems. Noticing something else during war is the slight but crucial
shift invited by the Romantic poetics of attention, and its afterlife.