Paul Armstrong, “This is Your Brain on Modernism”
The ability to tell and follow a story requires cognitive capacities that are basic to the neurobiology of mental functioning. Stories help the brain negotiate the never-ending conflict between its need for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The brain knows the world by forming and dissolving assemblies of neurons, establishing the patterns that through repeated firing become our habitual ways of interacting with the environment. As William James points out, however, the brain is also “an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium,” constantly fluctuating in ways that enable its “possessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in the environing circumstances.” Stories contribute to the brain’s balancing act between the formation and dissolution of pattern by playing with consonance and dissonance. Where novels in the tradition of realism typically promote our immersion in an illusion by facilitating pattern-formation, modernist works experiment with various strategies of disruption and defamiliarization that lay bare the cognitive processes through which fictions configure experience. Drawing on the neurophenomenological model of narrative that I develop in my forthcoming book Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), my paper will suggest some of the ways in which modernist experimentation plays with and exposes the processes of embodied cognitive figuration through which we tell and follow stories. How plots order events in time, how stories imitate actions, and how narratives relate us to other lives–these central concerns of narrative theory are curiously aligned with key issues in contemporary neuroscience: temporal synchrony and the binding problem, the action-perception circuit in cognition, and the mirroring processes of embodied intersubjectivity. Modernist texts from James and Conrad to Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner typically disrupt the processes through which stories configure time, action, and self-other relations in ways that can seem bewildering and frustrating or playful and amusing, and these effects have their basis in the paradoxes of the “unstable equilibrium” of the embodied brain.
Katherine Isobel Baxter, “Joseph Conrad Goes to the Cinema”
In August 1920 Joseph Conrad and his literary agent, J. B. Pinker attended a screening of the 1917 film of Les Misérables. This was no mere jaunt, however; Conrad and Pinker were intent on understanding how the cinema worked in order to inform their planned adaptation of Conrad’s 1906 short story ‘Gaspar Ruiz’. In this paper I want first to explore the extent to which Conrad and Pinker attended to the conventions of cinema in this period. On the one hand the manuscript and typescript drafts of this as yet unpublished work (which I am currently editing with Richard Hand for the Cambridge Works of Joseph Conrad) show complete inattention to the standards for screenplay composition. On the other hand, these two textual versions demonstrate a palpable desire to utilise the visual power of cinema to capture audiences’ attentions. By attending to the manuscript and typescript versions of the screenplay, I want to trace Conrad’s experimentation with the form of writing on the page, as he works out how to make visible through notation his imagined version of the film. Discussions will consider how that experimentation might be translated into a different canonising form – the Cambridge edition. This exploration of Conrad’s screenplay will prompt a further and broader consideration: it will invite us to revisit cinema as a striking mode of Modernist attention that fascinated everyone, from Dadaists to establishment authors alike. We will end by asking, then: how did cinematography make us attend to the world differently at the turn of the century? And how did it change the operations of attention in the fictional and aesthetic arts?
Olga Beloborodova, “Samuel Beckett and the Modernist ‘Inward Turn’: A Postcognitivist Reassessment“
It has long been assumed in critical literature that literary modernism was almost exclusively focused on plumbing the depths of the human mind, to such an extent that the so-called modernist ‘inward turn’ (Kahler 1973) has become a critical commonplace (Herman 2011). Although there is little doubt in the modernist endeavour to foreground an individual consciousness at the expense of general societal phenomena, the manner in which this project was ostensibly carried out calls for a reassessment. As a response to David Herman’s call to ‘re-mind’ modernism (2011), this paper offers a postcognitive perspective on modernist fictional minds by presenting the work by Samuel Beckett, considered by many the absolute champion of modernist introspection, as an oeuvre grounded in the nexus between fictional mind sand their storyworlds. The paper’s theoretical framework is extended cognition – a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the Cartesian dualist principle of the mind’s brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. The principal argument is that despite the inward-looking bias attributed to Beckett by early Beckett scholarship, Beckett’s fictional minds are not isolated ‘skullscapes’ (Ben-Zvi 1986). Instead, more often than not they are engaged in an interaction with their fictional storyworlds, however impoverished those may have become in the later part of his writing career. Without denying the enduring presence of Cartesianism in Beckett’s oeuvre, the paper sketches Beckett’s postcognitivist continuum, in which the dualist inside/outside boundary, clearly thematised in Beckett’s early works, gradually becomes more and more porous and loses its relevance altogether in the later texts.
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “Attention or Interpretation: Virginia Woolf, Pierre Bonnard, and the Proverbial Table of Philosophy”
My work on the proposed paper, still very much in progress, began with an intuitive sense of a fundamental affinity linking the work of Virginia Woolf and the later paintings of Pierre Bonnard, exhibited at the Tate Modern in 2019. Working in different media, these artists, I felt, shared not only a similar perception of the dynamics of subjectivity, whether rendered in words or in colour and line, but also a powerful vision of transcendence. And while the very concept of transcendence may elicit some suspicion or downright disparagement in the current intellectual climate, I would suggest that it is precisely the crux of the dichotomy posited in the proposed title of the paper. My initial exploration the potential productiveness of this intuitive response led to the discovery that commentators like Gabriel Josipovici and others have also indicated, albeit rather briefly or in passing, some lines of resemblance between these two contemporary Modernists. The proposed discussion, however, will relate to psychoanalytic conceptions of both attention and interpretation, drawing on the work of Bion and his successors, to account for Woolf’s literary and Bonnard’s painterly renderings of the mundane. I would suggest that these renderings, informed by a shared vision of the relation of art to life, cannot be encapsulated within the mode of ideological or suspicious readings which have gained exclusive currency in much of today’s academic discourse; that both these artists, however politically or ideologically engaged in their respective historical contexts, ultimately offer a particular variety of transcendence – horizontal, rather than vertical or metaphysical – through their insistence on a mode of attention that precedes and at times even undermines the workings of interpretation.
Elana Gomel, “Distraction, Pandemics, and the City”
Obsessed with time-management and the need for distraction during the pandemic, we are apt to see our situation as novel and unique. But is it? In my paper, I want to argue that the nexus of distraction and disease is inherent in the very structure of the modern city. While 19th-century cities suffered from a precipitous rise in infectious diseases, such as smallpox, cholera, and typhus, it also provided a never-ending stream of new sensations, pleasures, and experiences that required a new configuration of subjectivity. Implicitly or explicitly, distraction and disease were often linked through the discourse of madness or self-fragmentation; while the body is under attack by proliferating viruses, the psyche is bombarded by proliferating sensations. Viruses and experiences share the same structure of endless reproduction that undermines the coherence of the individual self. We do not escape this world of strangers through the digital media; if anything, the internet becomes our endless and inescapable urban agora. Disease and distraction generate new forms of spatiotemporal perception that are unique to the city, whether physical or digital. I will consider how the parallel between distraction and disease plays out in speculative fiction centering on urban experience. China Mieville’s novel The City and the City (2009) represents distraction as a perceptual contagion that spreads through the urban fabric, fragmenting it into overlapping “islands” of spacetime. In Tony Ballantyne’s duology Dream London and Dream Paris (2015), the eponymous cities are infected by an epidemic of nightmares that generate urban terrains that are both wondrous and horrifying, caught in a never-ending cycle of spaciotemporal mutations.
Amir Harash, “An Empirical Study of Ambiguity in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Emma Zunz”
Dixon, Bortolussi, Twilley and Leung (1993) offer empirical support for the claim that the ambiguity produced by the narrator’s account is the main focal-point of reader response to Borges’ short story “Emma Zunz” (1935). More recently, Kuijpers and Hakemulder (2017) tried to replicate these findings and failed. In attempt to offer a more rigorous empirical study of reader response to the story’s ambiguity, I used an eye tracking experiment. As readers read the story their eye-movements were tracked. They were then interviewed using a retrospective think aloud protocol: they were shown graphic visualizations of their eye movements (places where they lingered on the text were marked in red) and were then asked what caught their attention in these words or sentences. Readers’ attention was found to be focused on two stylistic devices: philosophical remarks and the unreliable narrator. Philosophical remarks had a greater impact on reader attention and invoked greater aesthetic effects as readers were more quick to dismiss the narrator’s unreliability. Even when it was noted and acknowledged, it was perceived as an annoying “trick.” The philosophical remarks were very often perceived as beautiful, even when they were not fully understood. When understood, readers tried to form an opinion of their own on the matter; they considered whether they agree or disagree with the claim. Another effect of the philosophical remarks was that when taken literally they effected a misunderstanding of the plot.
Hadar Levy-Landesberg, “Listen Up! Phatic Thresholds and Interface Design”
The paper points to the longstanding and significant role that the sound interface plays in shaping the ways we attend to media by considering its phatic function. Employing a reverse engineering approach, the analysis traces the historical transformations in the regimen of attention produced by sound media to date, followed by discourse analyses of scientific and industry communities of digital sound interface design. Introducing the term “phatic alignment” to describe how media and humans are arranged in space and adjusted to communicate with one another, the investigation draws out the increasing hold of the digital sound interface over the user’s attention and identifies the premises affording this trend. The paper argues that in abstracting the human ear as an automated “phatic threshold” that regulates the user’s attention, digital sound interface design situates the user in constant attentiveness to media and sets the stage for next-generation communication technologies.
Yael Levin, “‘Amy Foster, Amerika and After Bread: Modernism, Technology and the Immigrant“
Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s After Bread (1880) are read here side by side in order to show how modernist writing anticipates recent debates on the role of technology in the creation of blind-spots to cultural difference. The representation of attention, pace and memory are used to demonstrate where modernism is complicit in the marginalization of cultural difference and where it demands, stages or resists the reconfiguration of immigrant subjectivity. Such an investigation serves not only to test tensions within modernist thought, but as a counterpoint to similar tensions in recent critical debates on migrant subjectivity, between universalizing gestures and the emphasis on difference, between the position that all subjects are created in movement and the critique of such abstractions due to their cancellation of cultural and ethnic specificities. By returning to difference and upsetting generic expectations, Conrad’s writing serves as a warning against ideologically motivated generalizations both modernist and contemporary.
Maren Linett, “Making Us New: From Eugenics to Transhumanism in the Early Twentieth Century”
In this paper I trace some of the underlying differences in approach that distinguish the eugenic philosophy of Anthony Ludovici, as conveyed in his 1925 speculative essay Lysistrata, Or, Woman’s Future and Future Woman from the early transhumanism of J. D. Bernal, as expressed in his 1929 scientific speculation, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. While both eugenics and transhumanism aimed to improve the human species, they understood humanness and bodies differently. Some of these differences can be attributed to different models of attention and perception. As scholars such as Yves Citton and Jonathan Crary have persuasively shown, attention is both collective and historically constructed. The modes of attention available in the modernist period were contingent on a variety of technological and cultural forces. For example, when it became clear that a camera, a microscope, and a telescope could “see” things human beings could not, the possibility arose of removing attention and perception from human subjects. Moreover, as Crary agures, in the laboratories of the late 19th century, “attention was studied in terms of response to machine-produced stimuli…. Within this vast project, an older model of sensation as something belonging to a subject became irrelevant” (Suspensions of Perception27). Transhumanism took up just this possibility, imagining, in Bernal’s words, a sort of space station with “a number of effective sense and motor organs” and ultimately, a “mechanized humanity”—human minds in complex and malleable machines. But eugenics remained grounded in residual modes of attention that located attentional capacities firmly in human biological subjects, and therefore turned those subjects into the objects of often violent schemes of improvement. In part due to their different models of perception and attention, eugenics focused on perfecting the body, while transhumanism began to imagine transcending it.
Naomi Mandel, “Looking at and Through – Reading the Hunger Games“
Recent years have seen debates about the relative values of “surface” vs. “deep” reading. While deep reading is associated with the kind of attention that required to probe complex texts and extract truth from their illusory surfaces, surface reading is directed towards the forms of knowledge that screen reading, scanning, and hyperreading make possible. The surface/depth model maps readily on to the “crisis in the humanities” in which the media-induced state of distraction is condemned as the product of new media’s culture of perpetual stimulation. I aim to revisit this debate by examining the surface/depth model in the very devices on which we read, and historicizing these debates by setting them in the context of the history of computing. Developments in HCI (Human Computer Interface) technology, specifically the mainstreaming of graphical user interfaces (GUI) in the last decades of the 20th century, elicited a new kind of relationship with the images on our screens that can best be described as looking both at and through, and required rigorous engagement both with the surface of things and with what these surfaces render invisible or opaque. This technology instigated an approach to screen images that require both surface and deep reading. Time permitting, I will discuss Suzanne Collins’s young adult series The Hunger Games, focusing on how the novel elicits both surface and depth reading from its digital native audience.
John G. Peters, “Subjectivity, Attention, and Impressionism”
The works of Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad were in dialogue with the realism of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Influenced by scientific methodology, realism often projected an objective world (especially as realism evolved toward naturalism), a world determined by factors external to the human (for example environment and heredity) and largely assuming the autonomy of the object from the subject. Such authors as Ford, Conrad, and others, working within an impressionist conception of the world, challenged realism’s objectivity, positing instead not an alternative of impressionist subjectivity to realism’s objectivity but rather a negotiation between subject and object, where subject and object are each altered by means of engagement with the other. Through attention to their interdependency as well as attention to contextual factors (measurable factors such as place and distance relative to subject and object along with immeasurable factors such as the subject’s personal and cultural experience while perceiving the object), subject and object transform one another. The result is a world that is not objectively determined but one that is subjectively created, subjectively created through the interaction of subject and object. For these authors, being human is a dynamic not static state, one where the subject is constantly engaged with an ever-changing external world in a symbiotic relationship. In this paper, I would like to investigate where these ideas take me in the works of these authors.
Noam Pines, “The Problem of Attention in Kafka, Benjamin, Celan“
The paper examines a dialogue on the role of attention in the works of three German-Jewish writers: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Celan. Attention emerges in their works as an alternative model of recollection that eludes the conventional historical account as well as the figural constructions of human memory. Instead, attention addresses the experiential dimension of human life as an element that refuses to easily assimilate into the larger framework of the historical event. The paper traces the emergence of this notion of attention in Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, and shows how it subsequently came to be appropriated by Celan in his pursuit of a poetry that attempts to provide Holocaust testimony. Celan does not conceive of such testimony as an attempt to formulate the historical account in “subjective” terms, but rather as an attempt to establish of a set of correlations between the historical event and the victim’s “creaturely angle of inclination.”
Josh Powell, “Not Quite There: Inattention in Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls”
The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century saw the development of numerous approaches to the concept of inattention. These approaches can be roughly divided into three categories: the repression-based, the task-based and the inattention of experience. In the former, evidenced most notably in psychoanalysis, the failure to notice or register an event is endowed with a personal significance – I do not see it because, on an unconscious level, I do not want to see it. In the second (more biologically-inflected) approach, this failure is talked about in terms of attentional capacity – I do not see the event because my attention is occupied by other tasks. These influential approaches differ in important ways but, in each, inattention seems to imply the failure to consciously register an event. This contrasts with the latter approach (investigated by, among others, Carl Jung and D.W. Winnicott) which takes inattention to be a tone of experience – an affect that we might attend to. Here inattention might be talked about as an experience of depersonalisation or not-quite-there-ness, in which the ‘I’ rather than the perception is brought into question – the event is registered but I do not feel as though ‘I’ have been there to experience it. This paper asserts that Samuel Beckett was aware of all of these approaches and juxtaposes them in the late play Footfalls (1976). It will question why, at this point in his life, Beckett was concerned with inattention and how he developed this interest into a theatrical aesthetic.
Yael Segalovitz, “The Music of Prose Takes Place in Silence”: Sound, Fury, and Faulkner’s Negative Audition”
It is no secret that the American forefathers of literature as a discipline, namely, the New Critics, were deeply invested in the oeuvre of William Faulkner. Yet their commitment to the Southern modernist is usually taken to be an expression of a mere regionalist interest rather than a branch of their larger aesthetic enterprise. As part of my book project, Close Reading on the Go: New Criticism and Attention in the U.S., Brazil, and Israel,I will suggest that Faulkner’s work was in fact pivotal to the development of the New Critical hallmark practice, that is, close reading. It is my contention that the New Critics devised close reading as a technique of the self, a tool through which the reader could perfect her capabilities of attention, which they understood as a state of mind contingent on self-abnegation and a radical openness to otherness. In exploring this claim, I will focus in my talk on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and demonstrate how this novel works—via the manipulation of fictional sound—to elicit in its readers precisely such attention-as-self-suspension. More precisely, the novel instructs its readers in how to attend to and inhabit ghostly sounds, a mental and sensory practice that requires, to borrow Derrida’s terminology, “negative audition.”
Leona Toker, “The Axiology of Attention (through Nabokov’s Lens)“
The readers’ attention fluctuates during the reading of fiction, and it is practically impossible to foresee what and how much an individual’s reader, with his or her subjective leanings, will attend to in the given text. Yet more reliable statements can be made if the problem is reversed: narratological analysis can show how specific texts can create conditions for the reader to miss something on the first reading. When this happens there is usually a qualitative difference between the first and the repeated readings of the same text (we understand differently). Yet there is also a quantitative difference between the first repeat reading and the subsequent ones (we attend to more). The impulse to reread more than once is predominantly aesthetic: it models the training of disinterested attention which can also prepare the subject for attention of the ethical kind, given a conscious commitment to other people. The paper proposes to dwell on Nabokov’s Lolita in order to show how and to what effects our attention is manipulated on the first reading. I will then show how the ethics and aesthetics of attention are thematized in Nabokov’s earlier novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Antonio Luis Costa Vargas, “Attention and Allegory”
Amidst apps and ads we live in a world of engineered and calculated distraction. In antiquity, we find an analogy for this world in the theodicy of the Neoplatonist Proclus. According to Proclus, life on earth is so engineered that most human beings will fail in the pursuit of virtue and happiness, a central component of which is the achievement of uniting the soul and turning it away from the distractions of the perceptible world. This concerted attack on our moral faculties is thus an attack on our capacity to concentrate and attend to eternal things. It is only the philosophically trained few who, according to Proclus, can pierce the veil of illusions and read the enticing perceptible world as a series of allegories, thereby using the very distractions that harm others as opportunities for contemplation. In my paper, I will present Proclus’ understanding of attention, the role of distraction in his theodicy and finally how allegory functions for him as a defense of the necessary distractions of the world.
Please check back soon for updates to this page
New Modernisms - Coming to Attention 