The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

This book explores the ethical and political dimensions of attention, drawing on the perception of invisibilities and visibilities and demonstrating how attention can be trained and strengthened to achieve epistemic justice. It offers a reading of attention's narrative relevance in social invisibilities, climate change, AI, and cognitive disability, and provides a poetics of attention through intensification, repetition, and metalepsis.

Format: Hardback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 27 December 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This groundbreaking work is the first of its kind to explore attention as a literary category by emphasizing its relational aspects rather than its inward-looking function. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, ethics, including the ethics of care and vulnerability. One of the book's innovative aspects is its consideration of the ethical and political dimensions of attention, drawing on the perception of invisibilities and visibilities and demonstrating how attention can be trained and strengthened to achieve epistemic justice. Another strength of the book is its ability to offer a comprehensive reading of attention's narrative relevance in various fields, such as social invisibilities, climate change, AI, and cognitive disability, which have garnered significant public interest in recent years.

The book takes care in providing a poetics of attention as thematized in and performed by narratives. To achieve this, it relies on traditional categories such as point of view, voice, repetition, tropes, and predominantly the metalepsis to show how, through intensification and repetition, the reader gains an experiential knowledge transferred.

Overall, this monograph makes a significant contribution to the study of attention by exploring its multifaceted nature, ethical implications, and narrative relevance. It will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as well as those concerned with the broader implications of attention in our contemporary world.

Weight: 530g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032423203