Bennett, Alice (2022) Wallace and Attention. In: David Foster Wallace in Context. Literature in Context . Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781316513323 (Accepted for Publication)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
It is tempting to see “attention” as the unified and unifying theme that runs across Wallace’s whole career. Readers have consistently understood Wallace’s writing as an inquiry into aspects of attention that intersect with his interests in philosophy, politics, economics, information, education and cognitive neuroscience, producing a complex
aesthetic-ethical framework with “attention and engagement” at its heart. Attention itself therefore becomes something like the rimless hub of the tax offices in The Pale King – a central routing point through which many of Wallace’s other principal interests are funneled. But is there a coherent definition of what attention is in Wallace’s work? And does attention have a single “context” from the second half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first? In this chapter, I am interested in laying out some of the discontinuities and contradictions in “Wallace’s attention,” and in identifying the extent to which these complexities are also reflective of a historical period in which attention and distraction have been highly scrutinized and charged with cultural meaning.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Alice Bennett |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Oct 2022 11:04 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 16:25 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3653 |
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