Bennett, Alice (2020) "Tuning into my 'Awareness Continuum'": Optimized Attention in The Yips. In: Nicola Barker: Critical Essays. Gylphi. ISBN 9781780240923
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Nicola Barker's 2012 novel, The Yips, is saturated with a diffuse, unfocused awareness of matters of focus and awareness. The characters in the novel are notable
for an attention to their own attention that is so pervasive as to be virtually epidemic; they talk constantly, and what they talk about is their own attention, specifically using the idiom of self-optimization. The word ‘focus’ becomes the signature of this more general cultural comprehension of attention as a faculty of the self that can be monitored
and ultimately administered for optimal efficiency. Appearing
in the characters’ conscientious self-reporting, instances in which characters describe ‘tuning in’ to the shifts of their own awareness index a self-monitoring attention that extends outwards to the novel’s own reading experience. The novel orchestrates various pitches of attention in its descriptions, from the precision of intent focus to the ‘gentle, watercolour wash of concern, querulousness and supreme indifference’ (Barker, 2012: 36). The novel therefore both shows
and tells attention, and there is no escape for a reader who wishes to engage with The Yips (even on a ‘purely intellectual level’) without developing a discomfiting self-consciousness of their own attentive processes.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Alice Bennett |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Oct 2022 11:20 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 16:15 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3654 |
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