Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative

<p>This book uses attention as a prism through which to interrogate the literary text. It starts from analyses of the changes that the mediasphere and communication technologies have brought for the contemporary subject submitting him/her to the tyranny of a new attention economy. My point is that the contemporary novel and memoir resist such influences and evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an “ecology of attention” (Citton) based on poetic options whose pragmatic effect is to develop an ethics of the particularist type. To do this I draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: psychology but also more prominently phenomenology political philosophy and analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy) alongside the ethics of care and vulnerability. By using a selection of fictional and non-fictional narratives I address such issues as social invisibilities climate change AI and cognitive disability and end up drafting a poetics of attention.</p>