Literary Attention in Short Fiction, or: What Literature Knows About Attention and Attention Politics

Literature knows a lot about attention how it is gained and retained, how it is mastered and manipulated.

As such it can contribute significantly to current research in interdisciplinary attention studies, transform debates about attentional crises, and offer deep insight into attention regimes we live by.

LitAttention explores this fundamentally under-researched knowledge domain of literature about attention and attention politics by analysing literary attention in short fiction.

As LitAttention will show, short fiction does not only cater to short(er) attention spans: its development was driven by attention anxieties and struggles for attention control, which responded to technological innovation, new streams of information, the rise of attention studies, changing modes of reading, growing concerns about the limits of human attentional capacities, and intensifying struggles for attention sovereignty.

Integrating approaches from educational psychology, computational linguistics, and literary and cultural studies, LitAttention has four key objectives.

It will (1) examine the various ways in which short fiction has been shaped by but also shaped discourses on attention and attention management; (2)analyse the poetics and politics of attention in short fiction by identifying syntactic, semantic, and narrative strategies that elicit attention, and assess how these narratives reflect upon, support, or subvert attention regimes of their time; (3) develop (transferable) methodological and conceptual frameworks for examining literary attention; (4) introduce the important role of literary attention for education.

The project is the first to conceptualize literary attention and propose a networked approach for its analysis.

Its results will reveal the crucial role of short fiction in changing ecosystems of attention, have a deep impact on education, and change the way in which scholars, teachers, and the general public approach the knowledge and value of short fiction.